Mod: Dominions 3000 v0.81 - lots of new indies, new map (using the brand new map commands)

[Darkwind]

DOMINIONS 3000 BUGS & NOTES, CONTINUED.
-We should probably get a flag for Neoclidia.
-The starting commander is a regular Warship, not a commander.
-The Orbital Station is really cheap compared to the other ships.
-The Neoclidians seem schizophrenic about resource:gold ratios. Half of their units have huge gold costs and tiny resource costs and the other half are almost even (with fairly high resource costs). Neoclidia has no resource sinks, but no 1-resource units to spam either. Just a note less than a bug I guess.
-Ulm's only unique pretender is the Superior Intelligence Droid? You'd think they'd have something big, bulky, and brutal, truly fitting the spirit of Ulm ("Take a big gun. Double the size. Now make it shoot faster. Attach that to a giant tank, and you have Ulm's light infantry.")
-In a test game, Ulm failed to appear. No capital province, they simply didn't exist.
-R'lyeh can summon Ao, Aka and Dai Oni. I don't think that's supposed to happen.
-Jomon also failed to appear in the game. It centered on a province, but no capital.
-Jomon CANNOT summon Ao, Aka or Dai Oni. Hmm.
-The Orc summons are spread accross several schools. Not necessarily a bad thing, if they'd be too strong otherwise.
-The Commonwealth started on the big star planet. I find this highly amusing.
-The Ice Citadels are immortal, i.e. they all revive in the capital. That could be a lot of citadels.
-The Commonwealth is really dependent upon its dominion (its land troops are much stronger in its natural cold climate, its ships are useless in warm climates) but its only priest is a 350 gold mage with only H1. That's not weak, that's inhumane for practically any nation. Plus, the only other way to increase cold is a Citadel, a level 7 summon for 3 gold that can be bumped into your home province where it does no good.
-BY THE WAY JK AND KO, if you're reading this, it would be awesome if a unit's magic could vary based on scales (order/turmoil, heat/cold, etc.). It would be very thematic for nations like Piria (or Abysia, or pretty much anyone whose 'uniqueness' is mostly tied to a certain concept represented in a scale). Plus, it might be cool to tie a Teacher's magic to both Order and Cold.
-Wyrmling phase, not wyrmling fase.
-Destroy Demon is an H3 spell (ie only the High priests of Shiar can cast it), Destroy Demons H4 (ie only a prophetized High priest can cast it). That's a high requirement.
-In several of the nations, the summons are strewn all across the paths, often with medium or high research requirements. While I know that's intended for, say, the Dragons, that's still quite a bit of variance for nations like Shiar.
-The Commonwealth has no capital-only units, not even the Teacher is cap-only.
-Again, the Ice City produces 3 astral pearls, while the Commonwealth has very few Astral spells, if any, and pretty much no access to Astral magic.

[rdonj]

-In a test game, Ulm failed to appear. No capital province, they simply didn't exist.

Eh? Now that sounds like a bug with the map. Possibly. There is only 1 start per major planet, so if there were more nations set for the map than avaiable planets, it's possible I guess that they didn't show up because all available planets were taken. But that shouldn't happen right, because it should only allow you to set as many nations as there are start locations. Or I just messed up and one of the planet start locations was messed up. That said I just looked quickly at the start locations and it seems everything is in place.... In conclusion I have no idea why you had that problem.

[Darkwind]

I put every nation on the map. Maybe that's the problem?

[rdonj]

Well, we have 9 nations now and I think we only have 7 start provinces... so if you fit all nations in then yeah, that is probably why. But I wouldn't think you'd be able to convince it to LET you put all 9 nations in... unless I messed up somewhere on the map . Anyway as long as you stick to 7 it should work fine.

[Darkwind]

Well, only two nations were missing, so the math works out.

Of course, this means we need an even LARGER map to fit even more nations. Onwards, to a 1500-province map!

Edit: And with the new commands, we can make the 750 space provinces look awesome!

[rdonj]

So you're the one who's going to make this new map, right darkwind? Remember, you have to set all the provinces by hand! Nah, whoever makes the next map is much luckier than me, they get to have all the province garrisons made for them....

Actually though, I think we could fit at least one more sart location in. The small planet cluster at the top right has enough land that it would work as a start location for either the orcs or the insectoids, if we set them to always start there. And if we really wanted we could start the other one in the bottom middle. I don't think it would be unfair to, say, have the orcs in the top right and the insectoids bottom middle. It would help balance out their overpoweredness a bit :P

That said, we simply will not have the space for all nations when qinus/pyria/machaka come out by any stretch of the imagination. So yeah, we do almost need yet another new map already....

[Darkwind]

Maybe we could make the 1500-province map a No Independents map? That would solve the garrison problem!

Though, all we'd really need is a map with 20-some individual planets (we are aiming for about as many nations as your average base era, right?). Larger games might get a bit crowded, but we can call that a feature of the mod

[rdonj]

Well, no independants maps don't really have NO independants, you just can't recruit any. You still have to take over provinces normally. Unless we wanted to create some kind of "really no independants" map, where you rush as many commanders as you can across the map to gain provinces as fast as possible.

I think as long as there's one major planet per nation that's probably fine, although we might want one major planet and one minor planet (i.e. a 7 province and a 3 province). I doubt we'll ever need a 1500 province map, we really don't need more than 15 provinces a player and we'll NEVER have 100 dom3k nations.... Unless aezeal comes back fresh and full of ideas from playing dawn of war, like deciding he wants to create tyranids and eldar or something, I don't think we'll ever get above 15 nations, really. So we're probably not looking at anything beyond 250 provinces.

[Aezeal]

that cluster is meant to be a start site

I'm not doing much till I get my new commands and we can finish the new map with the backgrounds and then start a MP game

once I play again I'll work on Machaka
and of course I need to have normal graphics again dammit

[Aezeal]

and as reply on previous messages: I've done a spellcheck (somewhat).. a large part of the typo's should be gone