Any Machaka love?

[Burnsaber]

Demantiae, I love your ideas. I'm too very fond on the idea of making "uncorrputed" LA nations. What can I say? I'm just a sucker for happy endings.

The best way to start nation modding is to read the modding manual (it comes with the game, in dominions3/docs), it will give you some idea about what can be modded and what cannot. Also, take heed from another mod nation .dm file. You can avoid many starting troubles by copying structure and pieces of code from a working piece.

[Lurker_at_Threshold]

Originally Posted by Demantiae

Only thing left to decide would be how the priesthood is represented. If God Mountain was purged then some sort of inquisition would be in order. I'd keep the settup of the priests (Eyes, Ears and Mouth of the Lord) to some extent. Give the Eyes and Ears the Inquisitor bonus as they're out actively looking for corruption and threats to the faith. The Mouth of the Lord can instead have access to astral magic as they spend a lot of time communing with their god and interpreting his/her/it's commands. Maybe the king is now a priest-king and the vessel of the god? His person is chosen from amongst the ranks of the Voices and his priest abilities match theirs but he is a more powerful astral mage. Machaka could be a relatively good astral nation but a choice would need to be made about using their expensive astral priests as communion slaves or not.

How does this look for mage selection. I love your idea for reinventing the eye, ear and voice.

Spider Elder- A drider mage representing the loyalist black sorcerers who were transformed following the turmoil that preceded the rise of the new god. They would be capital only sacred, thugable commander. It has all slots minus feet and comes with 1F 1E 1D

Voice- With the fall of the Black Sorcerers, the Voice's found themselves to be the most powerful force remaining in Machaka. With the emergence of the new god, they have thrown themselves behind his worship with wild abandon, learning the mysteries needed to commune with him directly. They would be a recruitable everywhere sacred mage with 2H 1S 50%SNFE 50%SNFE. As you said, their principal role would be to form communions.

Priest Kings- The priest kings rule the great city of Timbuktu. The most magically talented Voices are sent to the capital in order to further their training. Particularly adapt in their knowledge of arcane mysteries, they direct the fate of entire tribes. Sacred capital only mage with 2H 2S 100%SNFE 100%SNFE 100%SNFE

Griot- Griots are a caste of scholars bound to serve the royal families of Machaka. They are poets, scholars, historians, storytellers and magicans, devoting entire their lives towards the service of their masters. With the rise of the priest kings, they have congregated around the great city of timbuktu with its many libraries and universities. Griots are recruit anywhere mages. They are good researchers but their magic picks are erratic and they lack astral 100% NFEA 50%NA 50%EF 50%NFEA

Witch Doctors-Your recruit anywhere death bootstrappers same as in MA

[Demantiae]

I'd say swap out the death magic for nature on the Spider Elders (abandonment of ancestor worship and the corruption that went along with it) and adoption of a more naturalistic outlook of things. Essentially the more nature focused Witch Doctors/Sorcerers are worked into the former Black Sorcerers combining the two as one unit/concept. The Witch Doctors were very fond of abusing their power so I'd think they'd disapear along with the mages of God Mountain and the Griots are their perfect replacements. Those who want to learn the secrets of things instead go to Timbuktu and the great library there and learn what they can. I like the random magic path access too, just keep them away from astral and death.

An idea I had for the priest-kings would to call them Vessels of the Lord. I'd give them H3 rather than 2 as a priest driven society requires a H3 unit IMO. You could probably balance this out by removing the Ears of the Lord, the nation (being the dominant culture in it's region) may not need to send out priest-spies so much. In fact it might be very insular (culturally and religiously) like China was historically. Leave the Eyes as they are but add the Inquisitor bonus and you have a patroling inquisitor unit that can take care of all your societal control needs :-)

I like the idea of the rumours of the Black Sorcerers being related to a dead god buried inside God Mountain being part of the reason for their destruction. Perhaps a false god arose in the mountain and the sorcerers, together with their spider assassins sought to gain total control over the nation. The priests of course knew better (perhaps prompted by some deity from the depths of the God Forest) and they rebelled thus leading to a civil war - priests vs sorcerers. Of couse the priesthood won, purged the sorcerers and those witch doctors they found wanting and imprisoned them all inside the mountain for all eternity. The Driders are all that's left of them, showing their devotion to the (winning) god by taking on his/her form and staying within the mountain as guardians of the fallen mages. If the god of the forrest is now the lord of Machaka rather than the god of the mountain it would explain why Machaka might be cool with the idea of having the monkey tribes as vassals and levies in their army.

If anybody has any idea's for making Machaka better let us know! I'll have a go at modding something for LA but I can't make any promises. Had a cursory glance at the modding manuals but that's all. If anybody could recomend an easy mod I could pick apart that would be great. My only modding efforts to date have been in the Hearts of Iron/Victoria/Euroa Euniversalis games and they were text file based. I often just took existing parts of the games (or mods) and just made alterations here and there to figure it out. If this is possible with Doms 3 mods then I could work something out fairly easily. I will however have problems with the sprites as I have absoultely no idea where to begin with those.

[Burnsaber]

Originally Posted by Demantiae

If anybody could recomend an easy mod I could pick apart that would be great.

Just select one that works. All nation mods basically do the same thing. Add units & new nation & some summoning spells.

Originally Posted by Demantiae

I will however have problems with the sprites as I have absoultely no idea where to begin with those.

There is a sprite editing tutorial here in the forums http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=42737.

Read the whole thread, there is a lot of machaka stuff discussed by DaveCG after page 2. You'll probably find it useful.

[llamabeast]

I think my Tomb Kings mod is reasonably comprehensible as are any of Sombre's mods.

[Aezeal]

As much as I'd like to recommend my dom 3 K mod I'll have to admit it's not very easy to read through.. (but it has nearly all sorts of uses of commands in it )

So I'd have to say that when I started modding I always had Sombre's skaven mod opened next to whatever I was typing it has everything you need in it.

The modding isn't the hard part in the end, getting your sprites is (as honeybadger shows us with his tons of lines of code in several mods but far to few sprites (yes this is meant to get you starting HB)) If you have an idea it's put into a mod very quickly if it's a thing that can be done.. or if it can't be done you'll have to discard it just as quickly