Beginner's Mod questions/wishlist

[JaydedOne]

Hi all,

I just jumped into Dominions II over the past week and a half and I'm having a hard time containing my enthusiasm. As a long-time D&D fan and a former MUD builder, I'm most intrigued by the mod tools and am hoping to, over the course of the next year, recreate my D&D campaign world via some extensive modding.

I do, however, have some questions that I don't initially see answered either in the docs or in searching through previous threads:

1) In modding the list of available Pretenders for a nation, are you pretty much stuck with the list of Pretenders normally granted to a nation (i.e. you have to mod an existing Pretender unit in order to essentially create a new one? How do you go about eliminating other Pretender units that don't fit your new theme if that's the case? Is there any way to add existing Pretender units to the theme?) or is there a flag you can add to a new unit in order to put it on a kingdom's selection list?

2) Is there any sort of flag that will allow you to make units "hero" units? If not, that's definitely on the wishlist as they're really one of the neatest ways to add flavor to your nations.

3) Are there any ways to get the raw sprites of existing units into Paint for modification? I didn't immediately see this option and am not sure if there's any way to do an alternate capture (like from the BlackUnitView map)

Thanks for the initial help. The mod tools as they exist already in their initial state look pretty great and I'm really anticipating their expansion in future patches! It's been a long time since I've gotten this excited about a game/project, even if the timing (given this law school thing I'm purportedly working on) could be better.

I'll be posting stats of created units down the line in a new thread. Commentary would be much appreciated as, despite devouring the forums and playing as much as I could over the past ten days, I'm still very fresh to the game and obviously still learning most of its complexities and balance issues.

Thanks,

Miguel

[JaydedOne]

Apologies. I did a more customized search after posting and found most of the answers I was looking for. Clearly my first round of searches was too general as adding a few key words taken straight out of my questions pulled up what I was looking for right away. Doh.

In any case, let's just go ahead and chalk this initial post up to a newbie who's enthusiastic, if not yet as thorough in his research as he should be. I'll be taking a look at the Black Empire mod's guts tomorrow to get a better idea of how some of the things I'm interested in are being implemented in, particuarly since Cook's world served as an inspiration for my own way back in high school.

Cheers!