New *Unique* Nations Brain storm thread

[Endoperez]

Conquest of Elysiun had draconians. You could check that for ideas, and for sprites to base your graphics on. They'd be about half the size of Dom3 sprites, or worse, but I know there are e.g. copper/bronze dragons (they guard iron mines I think) that are smaller than the drakes of Dominions.

[Shovah32]

Two word for that atheist nation: Stealth. Preachers.

[Sombre]

WraithLord said:
Sombre, I like your idea of an atheist nation. Do you have plans of actually making such a mod?

Nope, I'm not making it.

My plan is to update my mods and continue working on warhammer nations for the next few years, basically. So you won't see anything like the Atheist nation from me. Although I am introducing some weird play mechanics in the warhammer nations, like the Dogs of War getting their paymaster and unique commanders.

[Tyrian]

A crystal nation based on Earth and Astral magic (potentially blood and/or death equally). Slowly kill population, domspawn/summoned allies (with more population killing like ghouls), strong but few unit, use of conjuration.

History: The origin of the crystal nation lies in a meteor wich strike the world in past eons (accompagned by some calmars with feet). Quickly, primitive humans begins a cult to a strange luminiscent crystal. These tribe make humans sacrifice to the new and indifferent god. Sacrifice after sacrifice, something awake in the crystal, an alien consciousness, tainted by the sacrifice.

The new god quickly break and dominate the weak human spirit, and make them touch the crystal. The crystal devoured them, soul and flesh. After that, the crystal begin to growth and attract other animals or humans. It devoured all life wich touch him and began to devour the world.

Some ideas:
-Special unit, create by conjuration, who generate pearl but kill population more quickly. It is an immobile unit. The pretender god can be an special unit of this type.

-crystal mutant: Unit conjured by blood magic, it is a generic type of monster created by the implantation of a crystal in the corpse. The crystal infect the subject and devours his soul and knoweldge. These can give different spells: a spell like cross breeding and a spell to create assassin/spy.

-crystal unlife: These creatures are skeletton with crystal in the eye-sockets. They can have life stealing capacity at range.

-An idea for a hero: a crystal mage who touch voluntary the crystal and are ascended to a new form life.

It is a rough sketch. These ideas are quickly find, without balance reflexions. I'm not able to make a good mod because I'm very very bad to make graphism.

[TheMenacer]

I've been kicking around an idea for a plant based nation for a while now. I'd try to keep away from the generic fantasy tree-man archetype, and instead fill it out with hyper-specialized units like a "Siege Vine" which would be completely worthless and weak aside from its massive siege bonus. Basically the whole nation would tend towards having a slow early game, relatively poor offensive skills, but be a defensive monster until late game, when various investment summons like a creature that can't move or do anything other than freespawn immortal chaff finally build enough to just boil over and tear apart everything. I think a general jungle plant theme would be pretty sweet, along with stuff like parasitic fungi with a mind control attack, ranged units that spray flesh-eating spores, and maybe something like a fire cult (they're plants so they naturally fear and respect fire) to make them stand apart from Pangaea as far as the whole "we love us some nature magic" thing goes. Too bad I'm completely terrible at making sprites or I'd probably have done something by now.

[Aezeal]

Ow I can think of a great idea, I like this challange
first of I'm ignoring most of the "background" we might be able to think of wtf this race actually is later.

1. A race of immovable creatures which teleport (not by spell, just mapmove 1 and combatmove 0) from province to province.

2. No recruitable troops, just commanders

3. a commander for each magic type, has 2 power in that magic group.

4. The commanders do not attack in melee, they are immovable. They have an aura that deals damage or a mindblast, or will have to cast spells. So ultimate no melee nation.

5. they need a lot of combat summons, one for each magic level for each path.

6. combat will be through the aura's and mindblasts etc of the characters and their in battle summons.

7. No ritual summons for this race

8. no research, they know all spells, or all spells are in spell level 0 for this race

9. no item slots on our commanders/characters, no need for forging and equiping.

10. use for gems: only to upgrade your characters (empowering)

11. Leaders are 0 gc, just get one each turn from a fort

12. forts would be summons, their price combined with 0 gc leaders would be a major balance thing IMHO

ok that are the basics

what do you end up with. A race of immobile magicians who can only increase their strength by
1. getting more characters
2. empowering characters (which takes a lot of gems, which takes time)

this is equal to normal races in the sense that normal races can obviously get more troops
or make their troops stronger (usually indirectly through items, spell research which takes a lot of time and is not possible from the start

expanding:
move on or more of your immobile characters (which do have a mapmove of 1) onto an enemy province

combat:
your immobile (and completely immobile in combat) characters have several options
1. attack directly
2. summon troops
3. buff troops

obviously the "fun" thing would be to let each type (and type means the magic paths they have) have a different "niche" so let fire and blood have the strongest direct attacks (AoE would be nice)
others the better summons
and others the best buffs
and yet again others the best combat spells.

of course this would get boring and too easy.

So if your characters are UPGRADED (maybe each level, maybe every 2) the "niche" they have would change

So after 2 empowerments maybe blood and earth have the best summons, and air and fire the best buffs etc
(only the attack could not be changed, and, since it would have to be balanced from the start of the game it would probably not be competative anymore later in the game)

So choices for the player in a game are.. do I empower 1 character very high (LOADS of gems) and do I use my other characters as the standard lvl 2 pplz or several a few levels, or all only 1-2 levels?

Obviously the higher level character would be able to summon stronger troops, buff them better etc etc etc but he'd only see chaff and weak spells from the low levels characters....

This could go well with a kill population dominion, but would not be needed, IMHO they should just get no income at all if somehow possible.. or a MAJOR upkeep so you'd loose all cash each turn (no giving away all cash in MP) Pretender would just be a normal leader, but maybe with a lil higher magic level (3) of one of the types but which would cost a huge amount of points and a huge cost for new magic level. (no standard creation since then you'd be able to start with a level 9 who'd already have all major spells the rush would be too easy)

basicly you'd just be able to switch a bit of scales around and get more positive scales if your pretender was not awake.

now to give it some racial background, I'm thinking it could be a race of crystals in each color (not very original) or metals (also not very original) or elementals (again not very original) or (only a bit better but my favorite) monoliths with strange carvings (obviously there is room for improvement here.

IMHO this is the most original race posted yet

[Amos]

. A race of immovable creatures which teleport (not by spell, just mapmove 1 and combatmove 0) from province to province.

I think if you set AP below 2 it is reset to 10.

[Tyrian]

I think background must be the first thing to define for having a nation with a flavor. I can't think about unit or else without a background optic. Stats and other are secondary in my mind.

For the stats I'm totally agree with 1, 3, 4, 6, 12.

For point 2 and 11, I think there are not recruitable unit at all. The gold are useless for this entity (so is connected with 11). But spawn a mage leader by turn by fort is largely too powerfull and give no choice to the player. The player haven't any control on the troop he can have.

For point 5, 7, 8 and 10, I think the opposite. Majority of summons are ritual summons. The crystal unit growth "slowly". And research is needed because the Crystal entity (or his master if it is another pretender) need to make experiment to create new monster type. The crystal entity doesn't know all of his capacities at the start. Furthermore, this give to the player control on what he can summons, and better control on his strategy.

I have some more background ideas, based on the fact this presentation are for the EA. For the MA, the crystal mage hero betray the crystal entity, contains it and use it to create an empire. More classical nation, the cristal entity lost pearl production but doesn't kill population anymore. Crystal mage, crystal knight (hight cost, very good garning, hight MR), less special summons (no more crystal leaders but always crystal monster like elemental or crystal mutant).

In the LA, the crystal break his containement. There is a fight between it and the hero crystal mage. During this fight, the crystal mage severly "wound" the crystal entity. Energy flow by the wound and the entity became insane. His insanity strike equally the mage. For this age, it is the same logic of the EA, but with dom insanity and some new unit ethereal unit spawned by the energy flowed by the wound. These unit are auto-spawned. There is equally madness flagellant created by the crystal capacity to break human mind.

[Forrest]

How about a province conversion stealth preacher. He moves in a simply causes them to rise up and change Gods?

How about a national summons by the preachers? He converts the province and can summon units through prayer. Maybe stealthy and commanders at higher lvls. Holy units. An angelic army thing.

Could do multi turn summons for higher etheral, awe type units. Just when you think their down they pop up out of nowhere.

A raiding unit from on high rather than hell. Your PD becomes theirs on conversion.

Probably based on a home province preacher unit.

Antiblood and death nation.

[RedWurm]

A Magical Technocracy:

a nation run by a small elite of magical leaders, without much support from the people or the religious establishment of the nation they control. they have very poor PD, possibly some kind of dominion penalty and have trouble reducing unrest.

their armies are magically animated golems created by the national commanders. other than the basic chaff units, they have a hefty gem cost and, if possible, increase unrest in the province where they are created in line with their gem cost.

as the main restriction on golem spamming will be gems, the commanders need not be particularly powerful mages, while the properly powerful dudes could be very expensive indeed and old age will be rife.

Also, I like Aezeal's idea of summonable fortresses. this nation might possibly have a normal fort that could summon the basic chaff spammers, just to keep the locals unhappy, whereas the better commanders could only be recruited from summoned fortresses - which would necessarily compete with your army for gems.