Mod: Price of Power

[PvK]

This mod increases the costs and requirements for forging magic items which
increase magical power, and the most powerful power-increasing spells.
The changes are simple:

The magical path levels required to forge magic items have been increased
for the following types of items (cumulative):
* All magic power-boosting items: +1
* All magic items which generate magic gems: +1
* All magic items which summon monsters every month: +1
* All Unique magical items: +1

The requirements for extreme magic-power giving spells are also increased:
* Arcane Nexus's requirements are increased to Astral 9, Blood 9, and 320 pearls.
* The Wish spell's cost increased to 300 pearls.
* Tartarian Gate's requirements are increased to Death 8 and 20 death gems.
* Hidden in Snow's cost increased to 80 water gems (because it can give strong multi-path Earth mages).

The purpose is to increase the difference between nations and pretender
designs, by making it harder to acquire high levels in all paths of magic.
It also increases the difficulty of reaching the more powerful magic
abilities, and of reaching them with many mages, thus prolonging the
usefulness of lesser magic and of non-magic units, to some degree.

[Endoperez]

Heh, Hidden in Snow coupled together with Wish and Arcane Nexus. That's probably a bit overdone. It isn't a cheap spell at 55 gems... besides, aren't Spectral Mages much more common when summoning for random paths?


You have disabled Arcane Nexus from everything but spesifically made pretenders. Death 8 might be reachable with a national Death 4 mage, if he got the +3 Death artifact, but that's about it. There aren't enough boosters for even D5 mage to reach D8 IIRC. I'd say the D7 requirement is enough, together with both the apparent and the hidden increase in cost your mod creates. Boosters cost more gems, and the spell itself costs 20 gems/Tartarian...

[Edi]

Actually, Ring of Sorcery, Ring of Wizardry, Skull Staff, Skull Face will boost a D4 mage to D8.

As far as Hidden in Snow vs Spectral Mage, an Unfrozen Mage has the potential to hit W3E3D3. It has D1 and 3x 50% E random, 3x 50% W random and 2x 50% D random. A spectral mage really doesn't hold a candle to that in potential. I've routinely had Unfrozen Mages that had 2 lv 3 paths and one lv 2 path, and you can get up to three mages per casting. Given that water gems are not that useful for a lot of other things besides certain items, 55 for Hidden in Snow is not bad at all.

[PvK]

That's exactly right, Edi. I only hit the ones I knew that gave several new levels of other paths in combos. The focus of this mod is mainly on making boosting more expensive and slow, so nations are stuck in their niches for longer, and take longer and more effort to get out of them.

In unmodded, anyone with D2 can crawl in time to D7 via summons and magic items. In this mod, it will take considerably more effort. But notice that this suddenly makes taking higher levels of pretender magic (in all paths) much more valuable, because it's much less common for national mages to be able to get booster items, but once you get even one booster item, it's a valuable leap...

I'm starting to think I should probably have just removed Arcane Nexus altogether.

Edit: Again, the point is that it is harder to get high-level magic unless you are actually a nation whose mages have appropriate levels for it, or you have a pretender designed to help them to get it (at this mods new required levels) or to cast it himself. If you are the right nation with the right pretender for what you want to do, then it's only somewhat more expensive to do those things in unmodded. Suddenly mage-pretenders are much more strategically interesting.

[Makinus]

Would be too hard to adapt this mod to Dominions 2? I ask because i liked to use it in Dom3 in my desktop and would wish to have one for Dom2 that i play in my notebook....

My notebook can handle Dom3, but the turn processing is too long (900mhz processor), so i only use Dom2 with it and would like to have this mod in it too...

Thanks

[PvK]

If I remember correctly, no it wouldn't be too hard. However there are two pairs of items which have problems:

Staff of Elemental Mastery
and
Twin Spear

Dom 2 doesn't have a mod command for items by number, so you can only mod one of each pair. I figure the best solution is probably to mod neither of them and let them be exceptions rather than having one of the pair modded and the other not.

Then I think the new items and spells in Dom 3 just need to be removed and that's about it.

I'll give it a shot.

[PvK]

Wow, the user interface has changed a LOT since Dominions 2, and I had forgotten how much!

Hmm. Seems like I have a version which works... though I have only tested that you can start a game with it, the spells show the modded levels, and it didn't crash during the three or four turns I played with it.

The Dominions II version of the mod is attached to this message.

[PvK]

Ok, I also updated the Dominions 3 version of this mod. I removed a couple of extra commas (that probably had no effect) and also re-added the Nethgul (which apparently I had half-deleted via cut & paste when writing the mod) to the list of unique items wanting a +1.

PvK

[Makinus]

Thanks PvK! just downloaded it and will try during this weekend in my notebook (i will be traveling until monday)....