Mod idea and a request

[DrPraetorious]

EDIT: D'oh! No, the juggernaut is not a commander and it spreads dominion. So spreaddom does work for troops. Never tried a negative number. Negative spreaddom on a troop would instantly reduce the dominion in a province to 0 if you had a reasonable number of troops, however.

If you copy the stats off of one of the Pythium heretics, you'll get their dominion cancellation, which is somewhat milder, but still quite severe to put on a non-commander.

What do you want your custom spells to *do*? If it's just summoning, that's quite straightforward.

[SlipperyJim]

I only want the dwarven commanders (specifically the smiths) to reduce dominion. Once I get the trick down, I might expand it to other commanders ... but I doubt I'd have regular troops do it! I agree that such a thing could get extreme in a hurry, especially on recruitable troops.

(Yes, Juggernauts spread dominion ... but they're a very high-end summon.)

I suppose I could copystat the Pythium heretic, but then I'd lose the darkvision that I got by copystatting the "vanilla" dwarven smith. Hmmm ... decisions, decisions.

On the subject of spells: My main goal is to create a bunch of nation-specific summons, which seems like it should be pretty easy. However, I was also thinking about some battlefield spells. For example, I'd like to mod a "crystal healing" spell, an upgraded version of Blade Wind, and a "Crystal Soldiers" troop buff.

I think I might be able to puzzle out some of these on my own. Let me give it a shot, and I'll let you know if I can't get anywhere.

Since y'all are in such a helpful mood, let me fire off another question: How could I mod a site to allow free scrying? I know there's already a site that does it, so it should be possible. But is it moddable? It would be very cool to have the Crystal College serve as a scrying site....

[DrPraetorious]

It is not currently moddable.

You could take one of the (non-unique) existing scry sites, and put it in their capital, if you wished.

[SlipperyJim]

Okay, thanks for the quick response. I'll do that.

[SlipperyJim]

So, here's my first sprite ever. Behold the "stock" dwarven warrior:

Once I'm happy with him (and I'm not happy with him right now), I'll use him as the template for the rest of the dwarven warriors of Crystaldeep. The way I figure it, all of my dwarves (except the smiths) use some variant of Mining Axe + Tower Shield, so they should all look similar. A few color variations, some added embellishments here and there, and ... presto!

I'm done with all of the recruitable commanders and units, one custom pretender, and a handful of summoning spells. I've attached a preview of the mod, if anyone's curious.

Still to do:
* Graphics. Lots of graphics. I've only made one set of sprites so far, and I need to do a lot more.
* A few more spells: another summon, an evocation, and a healing spell.
* Heroes!
* (most important) Playtesting!

On that last step ... I'm not fussed about making Crystaldeep perfectly-balanced with the vanilla Dom3 nations. Personally, I'm not sure that all of the vanilla Dom3 nations are balanced with each other. Still, I don't want Crystaldeep to be too far out of whack. Mainly, though, my playtesting will be focussed on simply making the nation play as I envisioned it.

I'll do a more formal post when I'm actually finished with the first version of the mod. Comments welcome!

[Kristoffer O]

> Personally, I'm not sure that all of the vanilla Dom3 nations are balanced with each other.

Of course they are not

[SlipperyJim]

Um, oops. No offense was intended. I just realized that my quip could be taken as a complaint.... It was not meant as such.

I cleaned up that graphic a bit, and I'm a little happier with it now. It could be better, of course, so I'll keep plinking at it. Pixel art is hard. (Of course, I have no artistic ability whatsoever, so that makes it harder.) Once again, I am totally blessed by having KO's sprites to use as a baseline. Drawing all of these things freehand would be too much for me, whereas hacking up someone else's work might just be within my reach.

Final summoning spell is done. One evocation and a healing spell to go, and then a few heroes....