Blood Red FIGHT ON!)

[Aethyr]

Baalz, I concur with your statements; I think it is the recruit anywhere sacreds that put the nation over the top. So, some additional balancing should probally occur. The question is: how much time to you allow for this before starting the game? I'm not opposed to going forward w/o further changes, but this will inevitably lead to certain decsions in game that might not otherwise occur if the nation were more balanced.

[Jarkko]

Took a look at Themiskyra, and I have to agree they look way too good. They need serious toning down to be in the same ball-park with the other nations

[Gregstrom]

I'm inclined to down-power them myself. I just won a fight in Dramatica I probably shouldn't have (although I did get pretty damn lucky even so).

Vanilla Jade Maidens (and all the other amazon sacreds) are pretty lightly armoured, which may be why they aren't often used in preference to nationals. In Dramatica, there's the added problem that they have more prot than they were intended to, which doesn't help things at all.

Other than sacreds, Themiskyra isn't really great at melee (str 9 and spears - even with decent armour and defence, the basic units just don't seem to get anywhere against armoured troops) and so there might be an argument for having a sacred available anywhere. For this game though, I'd rather see how it went with cap-only sacreds.

The attached mod is a significant update:

- sacreds have a higher resource cost and Jade Maiden prices have been bumped to 60.
- armour is toned down a lot.
- sacreds are cap only.

This should change things noticeably, I hope.

[Burnsaber]

Originally Posted by Alpine Joe

Looking at Themiskra, I agree that their sacreds seem a little ridiculous. However the other mod nations in this game all have some pretty effective strategies as well. i say leave them as is, but everyone be aware of how strong they can be.

Since I'm the author of two of these mod nations that have "effective stragedies", I've decided to level the playground and help the players in this game by telling something about them.

You see, both of my nations (Dwarfs and Alugra) are pretty oddball and play out a lot different than most dom3 nations. If you try to use "conventional" tricks against them, you might be suprised.

Dwarfs

This is the nations second MP game, so there might be some balance issues. However, my feedback in the thread has mostly been about improving them somehow, so I'm quite confident that they are fine (if they are not, gangbang always works) . Dwarf military is likely best in the game, but cost a lot of gold and resources. All of their castles also cost 1200gold and take 4 turns to build. It is in essence, a slow nation to get rolling and is likely to play defensively, especially considering their good PD.

They have mages with forgebonus (gee, what a shocker), but only medicore diversity and only really strong magic in earth. Also, their most powerful mages have casting encumberance of 13!, limiting the magic support they can give to their troops. This is not a nation that throws fireballs around in the battlefield. You should note though that they have very heavy artilley unit at enchantment 7, "Anvil of Doom" that can do all sorts of crazy stuff. Be prepared to counter it if you think that the dwarfs have access to it!

If you face dwarfs, you should use shielded chaff troops to negate the effectiveness of their excellent crossbow archers (and ranger throwing axes!) and kill the melee forces with appropiate selection of magic. Anything that does AN/AP damage will do fine (poison, combustion, star fire/stellar cascades, numbness, gifts from heaven, fireball, lightning spells), try to avoid mr-negates effects due to their high mr and drain dominion. Be careful when using thugs or big sized troops against them, since they excellent counter to those in the form of slayers (who are weak to archery, try fire largest to target them since they have some extra hp when compared to other infantry).

In conclusion: To fight against dwarfs you need to switch gears to deal with a low number of extremely elite troops, instead of the chaff with mage support most nations wield.

Alugra

Alugra is another oddball. At the moment, it has gone through 3 MP games, facing slight nerfs after each one. IMO it is balanced at the moment. It has sucky national mages, but it has 7 different types of cap-only "gifted" troops who come with magic picks. The nation also comes with a national GoR spell that costs 7 astral gems.

Their regular non-cap forces are pretty meh, but the afromentioned gifted troops are superb and fill many roles, allowing Alugra to wield a wild smorgasbord of battlefield tactics. GoR'red gifted are also good thug chassises and this fact is only improved by their good selection of national self buffing spells.

If you face Alugra, you should be prepared to deal with gifted thugs and troops. Note that gifted are magical beings ("Control", "Moonblade" and "Opposition" ring any bells?). Also, being human(oid?), they have low hitpoints considering their big gold costs so AP/AN stuff works well. Scouting is also very important when fighting Alugra, learning their troop composition allows you to abuse the weak points of many gifted troops (poison with watchmen, lightining for Smiths, mr-stuff vs workers).

One of the oddest stragedies that Alugra can wiled is something called "Thug Communion". Alugra's single non-cap mage, "Manifest", is a guarantied S1 and has pretty good stats and equipment. Sometimes they are communioned en masse with leaders casting self-buffs and finishing the deal with "Use the Leylines". It is a national spell that clears 100 fatigue and blinks the caster. If casted by a leader, it affects all slaves too.

It's nasty.

You have been warned

[Baalz]

Alright, I've no objection to Themiskira in this state. I'm going to be out for the next couple days, I'll try to get everything settled and get the game up for Sunday so everyone finalize your pretenders. Last call for map discussion, unless anything else is added I'll pick one of the ones Truman suggested. Pyg, if you could rebundle the mod package with the changes Gregstrom put in?

[pyg]

Final version? Probably not as only a few people have tested it. Here is version 3.

[Sombre]

That little pyg makes me squeal every time.

So cute!

[Tollund]

Ogre maneaters and pitfighters are missing their weapons in the current version.

[pyg]

OK. Test #4. The process turned up an ' sprnbr too high for this file' that went away by changing the order of the mods. Weird. I'm going to chalk it up to the Ogres being ornery.

[Sombre]

'sprnbr too high' can also turn up halfway through a game, btw. It used to be a major pain in the *** when trying to use mod nations. The limits have been increased, but are still there. One of the reasons I've never tried to start another big all mod nations game.