Change starting points?

[FatKate]

So, my friend and I have been playing Dominions 3 a bit, but we wanted to start trying games with different amounts of starting points for buying magic, et cetera. I've been looking through pages of mods, and I also looked through the guide in the game directory for modding, and didn't find anything for this.

Is there an existing mod for this, and if not, would it be possible to make one? How would this be done?

[Endoperez]

The amount of starting points can't be changed.

Depending on what you would like to do with the points, you could make scale effects more powerful (every pick of Order gives double gold, every pick of Luck has twice the effect, etc), or make pretenders' paths start higher, or make pretender forms cheaper.

You could also mod some scale so that it has no effect, e.g. by changing Order/Turmoil so that it gives 0 percent gold increase and has 0 effect on number of events. That way, you can take Turmoil 3 every time without actually losing anything from it. You would get turmoil-based events (unruly guards defiling blood slaves, barbarian attacks, perhaps something like PD increase in the positive side) instead of order-based events (+100, 200, 500 gold from taxes events etc).

[Gandalf Parker]

You can manually create the god and scales and everything. Add it to the .map you will play on then turn off the cheat check

[FatKate]

Gandalf Parker said:
You can manually create the god and scales and everything. Add it to the .map you will play on then turn off the cheat check

This sounds like exactly what we need, and since we trust each other, we don't need to check for cheating.

I haven't done any editing of maps, but as long as it's fairly straightfoward, I should be able to manage. Are there any good examples or tutorials to work from?

[Endoperez]

There's the mapediting document in Dominions 3\docs\. The pretender/scale commands are pretty straightforward IIRC.

[Gandalf Parker]

You would still need to set cheat-check off if you plan to let one of you exceed the games usual limits. Otherwise the game will tell the other person that your god is a cheat (and I think it does bad things to you in the game also)

It will take you abit to get into doing this by maps but it will be worthwhile. You will be able to donate your god designs to the RanDom program to pop up as surprises on randomly generated maps.

To do it you should make a copy of the map file. Such as, if you want to play on the Aran map then make a copy of the aran.map file named something like aran_special.map
Its a text file you you can edit it with something like WordPad or NotePad.

The important commands for what you want would be
5.13 #god <nation nbr> "<commandertype>" pre-select the god of this nation
5.14 #scale_chaos <nation nbr> <(-3)-3> Forces the dominion scale
5.15 #dominionstr <nation nbr> <1-10> dominion strength of a nation
6.4 #comname "<name>" overwrites the active commander's random name
6.5 #bodyguards <nbr of guards>"<type>" Gives bodyguards to commander.
6.6 #units <nbr of units> "<type>" squad of soldiers to commander.
6.7 #clearmagic Removes all magic skills from the active commander.
6.8 #xp <0-900> Gives experience points to the active commander.
6.9 #mag_astral <level> Gives magic ability to the active commander.
6.11 #additem "<item name>" give specific item to commander


Here is a quicky ref chart of all the map commands.
http://www.dom3minions.com/docs/map_qref.txt