Mod: Magoserium

[Uh-Nu-Buh]

[edit: this post should always have newest version of mod attached for download. Now at 0.3.]

First release:

Mighty mages face extinction in EA. All their mana is being used to fuel their civilization. Their world teeters on the brink of collapse. Their only option--expand into neighboring countries, find new sources of mana to fuel their ever-increasing needs.

Highlights:
--many and varied magical servants recruitable in home province; skeleton dogs, aerial sylphs, water golems, crushing earth gnomes, and more.
--cripplingly low starting gem income, as all mana is going into pet projects, magical servants, political intrigues, and quests for immortality amongst the ancientest of sorcerors.
--meager priestly resources. the priestly tradition is new to Magoserium, and their adherents are politely and quietly scorned as lesser mages.
--powerful mages of all kinds.
--two new battle evocations.
--many, many, many cons for balancing.
--very different playstyle required....

Let me know what you think!

[Shovah32]

Holy ****. Those mages are nice and versatile but i have problems with the troops.

Bone Servant: needs higher precision for patrolling

Spectral Servant: 5 gold and 10 resources for a fear+0, amphibious, ethereal, 100% immunities with high movement is far too cheap

The rest, other than the holy servant i just find a bit too cheap but no major problems.

edit: Also, if you increase the cost of all troops to 15 gold each that might balance it out as there would actually be a choice of where to spend your gold(the 500 gold pearl maker guys are the only real choice, getting a d6 mage rocks)

[Uh-Nu-Buh]

Bone Servants: I'll take another look. Not sure why they would need more precision, as they are just undead dogs... they don't have any missile weapons (do I misunderstand something?).

Spectral Servants: they die very very fast. Good against low morale infantry, but archers and even slingers eat them alive. They are bone-china fragile. From my testing they seem on par with the other servants.

The mages may be too cheap. The Barons turn out to be the best deal, except with massive luck. The Archmage Citizens (the gem producers) are good about 1/3rd of the time. The other 2/3rds they are severely curtailed in usefulness due to old age.... I may have to take another look just to make sure.

Note that the servants are cheap on purpose. To start with you have no gems, and only one source of 1 astral pearl per month. This means your mages are expensive, fragile, all but useless commanders for the first X turns. Slow start. Thematically, one big cause of the lack of gems is the servants themselves. You are sacrificing gem production for good cheap versatile troops. To check this, they are only available from the home province. You will quickly find yourself using independants as the main core of your armies....

From my experience so far: early game relies upon servants; mid game you need independants; mid-late game you better have either great evocation or conjurings; late game mages come into their own.

Note that my best mages have all fallen to arrows, age, curses, horrors, etc.... They are as frail as they are powerful. Nothing like having a 500gold arch-mage die to a single arrow--or, even worse, die 7 turns after you recruit him, due to a disease he was recruited with.

[UninspiredName]

You think you could cut down on the descriptions a bit? I swear, reading it all makes my eyes bleed.

More seriously, you should consider changing the 'shock bolt' flysprite. Sort of weird it being an arrow... Also, I'd use a different color for the Earth Servant. It's mostly transparant as is.

Nitpicks aside though, it's a neat mod. Thanks for sharing it!

[Uh-Nu-Buh]

Shockbolt: Will do.

Earth Servant: Yeah, that's annoying. I like the picture, but for some reason that color stone (kinda granite) comes off in battles as translucent.... Have to remember it for future ether/astral/ghost critters. Will do.

[Shovah32]

An ethereal unit with fear+0 for only 5 gold and 10 resources is still far too cheap imo.

[Boron]

Shovah32 said:
An ethereal unit with fear+0 for only 5 gold and 10 resources is still far too cheap imo.

They are all capitol only though.


I like your mod Uh-Nu-Buh.
Especially your choice to make all troops capitol only is very interesting.

The mages are also creative. Their magical power and eventual magic versality seems really great, but they have lots of built in weaknesses like old age, low hp etc..
And you have to use them as rainbows for sitesearching i think.

A wonderful different nation .

[Shovah32]

yea i like it too. A decent SC pretender(probably dormant) with high order and growth is nice as you have a fairly early thug/SC and can mass produce mages without worryign about old age as much

[Uh-Nu-Buh]

Shovah32 said:
An ethereal unit with fear+0 for only 5 gold and 10 resources is still far too cheap imo.

I'll take a close look at it. I'll play a quick 50 turns using the Ether Servants as the main core and see what happens. You may be right. So far, they have been so fragile that I have avoided putting them into play. It could be that a different style of play than mine would use them more effectively, and they would be unbalancing....

How would you use them most effectively?

[Shovah32]

Screen of earth guys set to attack closest and a bunch of ether servants just behind on hold and attack closest, the earth servants reach combat and pin the enemy, the servants rush in and(due to small size and stacking fear+0) the enemy morale plummets, then the number of attacks and possibly evocations coming at them makes them rout.

I said the bone guys needed precision to make them good patrollers, now they just seem like weak ether servants.