Sombre's Mods

[hEad]

Originally Posted by llamabeast

We've had a couple actually!

DrPraetorius did this a while ago. I'm not sure how far he got. Personally I'm a bit skeptical that this could work well, being as the balance of a nation is a complex thing, but Dr. P seemed to be going about it in a pretty clever way.

How does MP mod nations work out? Are there any fights and name calling?

I can see how the points thing would be darn difficult - the variables are enourmous...

Wouldn't have a link to the good Dr's work handy?

Going to start myself a Skaven game.

[llamabeast]

I actually edited my above post to say more about the mod nation game I played in, while you were posting I think. No fights and name calling! (why should there be?)

No, I don't have a link to Dr. P's thing. Do a search for threads started by him in this subforum and it should be findable.

[hEad]

Originally Posted by llamabeast

I actually edited my above post to say more about the mod nation game I played in, while you were posting I think. No fights and name calling! (why should there be?)

You know, issues of balance that may of arisen.

[rdonj]

Well, the mods that were used were accepted as being reasonably balanced by the players beforehand. I tend to think that sombre's mod nations are just a little more powerful than the average nation, but the tomb kings are by no means weak. I did have the suspicion that the lizardmen might be a bit stronger than the others, but it didn't bother me. Honestly, the main reason me and sombre lost is we were trying to roleplay our nations a bit, and I didn't see any good way to back out of the war that made sense . So sombre and I battled it out while llama grew immensely powerful, and in the end we just didn't have the resources to defeat him.


Speaking of which, wasn't there supposed to be a sequel?

[llamabeast]

Also I'm awesome.

I actually made quite a few changes to the Tomb Kings following your comments rdonj, most notably giving the Tomb Kings themselves a consistent E1 so that they're reasonably likely to get E2, and making them correspondingly more expensive. I never quite released it though. I will do soon, hopefully.

[Sombre]

I made a few changes to lizards and have fairly drastic changes to Ogres planned (and in production) to make them less one dimensional. I had literally nothing I could do once llama was spamming stellar cascades at me in that game. I think Ogres will always lose to Lizards in the mid/late game but I want them to at least have some goals they move towards. Hence they get a whole new family of blood summons which keep them frightening in the next version.

[rdonj]

Originally Posted by llamabeast

Also I'm awesome.

I actually made quite a few changes to the Tomb Kings following your comments rdonj, most notably giving the Tomb Kings themselves a consistent E1 so that they're reasonably likely to get E2, and making them correspondingly more expensive. I never quite released it though. I will do soon, hopefully.

There is that too. The way you handled sombre's ogres was spectacular, and then perfectly sending in your god where I moved in large armies of sacreds twice in a row... that just crippled me right there, after those debacles I had no hope of recovery the rest of the game.

I'm really looking forward to seeing the new version of your tomb kings . And the ogres should be excitingly fearsome once they're finished.

[Jazzepi]

Your sprites look great Sombre.

Jazzepi

[Sombre]

Just putting up the Ulm Reborn teaser.

[Sombre]

I just had a crazy idea regarding the Warhammer nations. Modders often start with the idea that they will create a nation in all 3 ages - a version for EA, a version for MA and a version for LA, each with major differences, units, spells etc. This is a great way to tell a story and it's worked really well for many vanilla nations like Agartha, Abysia, Ermor and even 2 era ones like Pythium. But it's very rare for a modder to go through with this grand plan, because of the work involved and the fact that after you complete one era you're much more likely to be attracted to a different concept entirely for your next project.

So my thought is to package EA and LA versions of my 3 warhammer nations in with the main MA version, but to make the differences between them, in terms of work, extremely minor. In terms of gameplay though,... well there can be a much much bigger impact. For example a summon might become a recruitable unit, a spell might change research levels entirely, the costs and stats of certain units might change. This doesn't equate to a lot of work but you get to tell a story (changes to description), people get to use them in different ages and you can represent different facets of the nation that might be lost in the sheer variety of the MA version.

An example would probably be useful here. Let's take the Skaven. In their history Clan Pestilens was removed from Skavenblight for a looong time, only returning relatively recently. So an EA version might lack all Pestilens spells and recruits, with the other clans (particularly Skryre) holding more power and their units thus having altered stats/costs. Meanwhile in LA the opposite could be true, with Pestilens eclipsing the other clans, leading to cheaper, more numerous pestilens troops, grey seers replaced by Plague Priests as the religious power, eshin assassins switching their warpstone poisons for weapons using the disease magic of Pestilens, moulder rats and rat ogres becoming disease carriers... you get the idea. Once again the work I'd have to do would be far less than you might expect, but the gameplay impact would be pretty huge.

The bottom line is the MA version would remain the 'main' one and contain pretty much everything, while EA and LA would be different primarily through omission of content and quite heavy handed tweaking. They would also conform to the idea that magic is stronger in EA and weaker in LA.