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I'd say that I usually have around 1000 income pretty quickly, within the first year. Unless I'm going turmoil. Going with the high negative income will also fit with the flavor of being a single megacity instead of an empire I think the better choice may be to give the summons and spawns very high upkeep, the starting army in particular.
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Oct 3, 2014 21:25
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jBrereton posted:Lib, I'd go with -400 gold or thereabouts plus -400 or so resources. That's going to negate capital gold and res income except for incredibly high scales builds (which is obviously going to mean less magic for summons/bless potential, etc.) while still making the faction capable of building temples and labs etc., plus dabbling with mercenaries unless you just put them totally out of reach in terms of cost. This is a good idea. The hybrid nations need some sort of handicap because of the ton of magic poo poo I'm planning, but since they'll still supposed to have useful recruitable units (and temples + forts, of course), just negating cap income and adjusting fort + temple costs maybe enough to prevent their power from running out of control. The thing about summonable forts is even better, because I never thought about that. This would make it possible to make LA Akkad completely gem driven, with forts and dom-spreading units being summoned with gems and a gold income of zero. But as I said, I'll try to make the EA and MA nations first and the super-gimmicky nation last. If I'm finally making the third nation and it turns out having only one temple is too large a handicap, even with hundreds of special-priests spreading dominion around, I have a plan in reserve. Edit: And then Benly reminded me of a little problem with the "huge gold vortex of doom solution".  Benly posted:Does income come before or after ritual spells in turn resolution? If it's before, you could give them a zero-research version of one of the gems-to-gold spells - you cast it, then next turn it resolves after your ridiculous negative income and you have some money that turn (but will presumably lose it the turn after). The thing is, magic rituals come long before everything related to site effects and income. So I guess what would happen is: The ritual is cast when the turn resolves, then income comes, then the site effect sucks everything into oblivion. But ha, ha, I didn't even think about the effect on other nations, completely slipped my mind. I guess cap negation is the worst I can do without absolutely killing everyone getting that capital. (My plan for the pure gem-nation was giving all three startsites the -9999 on everything. Which means yeah, every nation getting that province would have been practically dead income-wise.) Looks like I have to work with units and building costs, like I planned before noticing I could turn a site into a gold vortex of doom.  Speleothing posted:I'd say that I usually have around 1000 income pretty quickly, within the first year. Unless I'm going turmoil. Going with the high negative income will also fit with the flavor of being a single megacity instead of an empire Mostly this. Units, summons and spawns with obnoxious upkeep, every building ludicrously expensive, but only a mild, mostly cap-negating drain from the starting sites. Generally though, the more magic crap I'll give to a nation, the more horrible I'll make the gold income to compensate. That's the plan I think will work best for now. Libluini fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Oct 3, 2014 |
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Oct 3, 2014 21:35
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The other thing I'm not sure about is how having negative gold interacts with #gcost 0 commanders, because for most nations, if your income and treasury is negative, your commanders will start deserting en masse - I'd maybe try that as a first port of call before you make the whole nation and find out that your summoned units don't stick around for more than a turn or two.
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Oct 3, 2014 21:50
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If you can't afford upkeep, units desert. I don't really see how you can balance against that.
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Oct 3, 2014 21:51
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jBrereton posted:The other thing I'm not sure about is how having negative gold interacts with #gcost 0 commanders, because for most nations, if your income and treasury is negative, your commanders will start deserting en masse - I'd maybe try that as a first port of call before you make the whole nation and find out that your summoned units don't stick around for more than a turn or two. Commanders don't desert, only regular troops. Try losing all your lands except a cap full of expensive mages who can drive off storm attempts.
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Oct 3, 2014 22:10
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Daeren posted:Can I get some input on good ideas/possibilities for EA C'tis pretender/scales design, or general strategy? I'm picking a nation that sounds cool as generally suggested (Egyptiopotamian Lizardmen that drown people in skeletons sounds Primarily recruit elite slave warriors as troops. They're tougher and cheaper than your other lizard troops. You could try an awake dragon to help for expansion or try a dormant Neter to cast stuff like globals and have some good scales as well. For magic, all your reborns can spam Horde of Skeletons, and depending on the randoms of your Sauromancers, stuff like Stygian Rains, Rigor Mortis, Life After Death, and communion boosted Nether Darts are great. Your shamans are excellent as communion slaves for your S random Sauromancers, and can all cast Stellar Cascades if someone casts Lights of the Northern Star.
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Oct 3, 2014 22:18
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) but I know basically nothing else from there beyond "find out how to summon skeletons, throw skeletons at people."
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amuayse posted:Primarily recruit elite slave warriors as troops. They're tougher and cheaper than your other lizard troops. You could try an awake dragon to help for expansion or try a dormant Neter to cast stuff like globals and have some good scales as well. This inspired me to start up a game. Blind expanded with my Devourer of Souls into one of the six non throne provinces around my capital.  She did pretty well all things considered, the death breath added by Pudmod is awesome. It goes without saying that the other provinces had nothing worse than militia.
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Oct 3, 2014 22:47
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goatface posted:If you can't afford upkeep, units desert. I don't really see how you can balance against that. Sacreds and commanders don't desert.
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Oct 3, 2014 23:56
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Daeren posted:Can I get some input on good ideas/possibilities for EA C'tis pretender/scales design, or general strategy? I'm picking a nation that sounds cool as generally suggested (Egyptiopotamian Lizardmen that drown people in skeletons sounds You want income scales like Order/Growth so you can spam palisades, labs, and temples. If you take an awake expander like a dragon you can probably afford to go into Sloth as well, as most of your troops are not resource-intensive and you don't need the resource-intensive ones past the expansion phase really. I like to take a dragon just because C'tis has a subpar troop lineup in general, but EA isn't as bad because you still have elite slave troops and indies are weaker in general, so if you are confident enough in expansion, you could take a dormant or imprisoned god with good magic paths for globals and good scales, probably not going sloth in this case and going production instead, as lizard chariots are actually pretty good units, but expensive. Generally though you want to rely on your heavy infantry (or city guards if you have poor production) in small numbers backed by larger numbers of elite warriors for expansion parties. Your goal is to get lots of forted labs up and running so you can recruit sauromancers in bulk, but if you're short on cash Reborns can do in a pinch, as they have the D2 necessary to cast Horde of Skeletons.
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Oct 4, 2014 01:17
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dis astranagant posted:Sacreds and commanders don't desert.
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Oct 4, 2014 02:49
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 Ugh, finally. It took me several tries to take over the underwater-fort in this province, not one, but two major underwater-armies got drowned in hydromancers summoning water elementals over and over. They were finally beaten by the same tactic I used in my second attempt: Casting Phantasmal Army over and over. Air against Water: The Final Battle. (This was after my first attempt, fighting underwater wizards underwater with orb lightning while my normal land units slowly walked through the water to stand around and get killed by waves of water elementals, sadly didn't work out as planned.) This time however, I stiffened resistance by also summoning water elementals and bringing some trolls to the party. The chaff died again, but the magic creature battle this time ended in my favor with the hydromancers being overwhelmed. The mountain of enemy water elementals then was surrounded and slowly beaten to death. It took me only three tries and several hundred units to achieve this incredible victory over a couple of hydromancers. Another Mod-Update Still working on the simple things. The recruitable units and commanders for EA Lagash are now finished (minus 2-3 descriptions I forgot):  So far, everything works. Since EA Lagash is practically the hybrid-nation with the most normal recruitment-lineup, I've only mildly capped the cap-income: The sites reduce ressources and gold by -50/-100. But real testing can only start after all the summons are finished, of course. Next on my to-do list: -Missing descriptions -Summonable units, styled after Mesopotamian demons if possible -Summonable commanders, see above -testing and fine-tuning -Doing everything all over again for MA Akkad and LA Akkad. Welp, at least LA Akkad has only three recruitable units and at that point I hope I can recycle some of the summons from earlier ages. Now I just have to get that far. Libluini fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Oct 5, 2014 |
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Oct 5, 2014 14:59
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I managed to get my Son of Niefel pretender killed in the first year to a Bog Beast rebellion. I thought him and his Jotuns handled the encounter fine, albeit with a little bit of poison. But once all the bog beasts fled the game seemed to speed through about 50 combat turns or something, in each of which there was a message about 'The Independents have routed' and him taking a tick of poison damage so he died apparently out of the blue. Is that just how poison works in combat, or is that a bug?
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Oct 5, 2014 17:03
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Boing posted:I managed to get my Son of Niefel pretender killed in the first year to a Bog Beast rebellion. I thought him and his Jotuns handled the encounter fine, albeit with a little bit of poison. But once all the bog beasts fled the game seemed to speed through about 50 combat turns or something, in each of which there was a message about 'The Independents have routed' and him taking a tick of poison damage so he died apparently out of the blue. Is that just how poison works in combat, or is that a bug? It's how it works; the remaining rounds of combat tick off for things like poison when the battle ends. Typically nieflheim wants a nature bless to regen past things like that.
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Oct 5, 2014 17:13
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Boing posted:I managed to get my Son of Niefel pretender killed in the first year to a Bog Beast rebellion. I thought him and his Jotuns handled the encounter fine, albeit with a little bit of poison. But once all the bog beasts fled the game seemed to speed through about 50 combat turns or something, in each of which there was a message about 'The Independents have routed' and him taking a tick of poison damage so he died apparently out of the blue. Is that just how poison works in combat, or is that a bug? Yeah, it's the same for bleeding. It will eventually wear off (poison lasts 10 turns, dealing 10% of the total poison damage per turn, while bleeding has a 10% chance + regen level of stopping per turn, according to the manual). It's so that you don't just magically heal the poison/bleeding once all of the enemies are gone. EFB
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Oct 5, 2014 17:15
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So I cast Eyes of God in domboobs and uhh Lanka is really loving huge people.  That big yellow-orangish line on top? That's him. He has a lot of provinces.  Same color, also on top. Lots of gems flooding in.  Really, really big. (click for stupidly big image if you want) Now, as you can see, I am literally on the other side of the world from him. I am completely unable to move any of my poo poo anywhere to physically do anything about this. So, by the power of overzealous  style information warfare, I beseech all who are able to punch the monkey demons in the dick to please do so. Thank you.
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Oct 5, 2014 17:16
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Thats just how poison damage works, the battle keeps running until all units are no longer on fire/poisoned.
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Oct 5, 2014 17:47
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GenericOverusedName posted:Lanka is really loving huge people. I'm Agratha and I invaded Lanka last turn. So far I managed to poison about 10 of my own units to death with my own units. Next turn I anticipate setting my casters on fire, and for a big finale maybe opening the seal and having one of the imprisoned ones land on my cap. It's not just Lanka's size and gem income that make them dangerous, it's also that they're a blood nation. If Ctis and TC don't join with me, that's gam e for sure. TNN is already hosed and should be considered Lanka territory, and I'll probably be down to my cap in about 5 turns if nothing changes. Also, Machaka should negotiate something with Atlantis and invade as well. Smerdyakov fucked around with this message at 19:47 on Oct 5, 2014 |
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Oct 5, 2014 19:43
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garth ferengi posted:Another new game, we are the dinosaurs! I'll take any amount of players, it's MA, common random events, 15 provinces a player, no MA ermor, etc etc standard stuff, using a slightly newer version of pudmod. Signal boosting this, I'm going to close it tomorrow night and then start harassing people about uploading their pretenders shortly afterwards, players of all skill levels welcome etc
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Oct 5, 2014 19:50
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Smerdyakov posted:I'm Agratha and I invaded Lanka last turn. So far I managed to poison about 10 of my own units to death with my own units. Next turn I anticipate setting my casters on fire, and for a big finale maybe opening the seal and having one of the imprisoned ones land on my cap. It's not just Lanka's size and gem income that make them dangerous, it's also that they're a blood nation. If Ctis and TC don't join with me, that's gam e for sure. TNN is already hosed and should be considered Lanka territory, and I'll probably be down to my cap in about 5 turns if nothing changes. Breaking the Seal is always the best possible choice of action.
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Oct 5, 2014 20:14
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To begin with I just want to say that I am deeply ashamed of my borders(as Tien'Chi), and I really tried to stop this border gore. Secondly, I would like to join in on Lanka, but the fishmen are angry at me, I don't know why!
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Oct 5, 2014 22:07
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Man in TarSwallot I know we had a good Cold War going on for a bit but you have two thrones that are very dear to my heart and I desperately am needing to remove you from them. Thank you for your understanding, your soon to be giant man eating overlords from the south.
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Oct 5, 2014 23:11
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The fishmen are angry at you because you randomly, and without provocation, attacked Fomoria's capital while I was in the process of sieging it. So while I may have previously harboured intentions to attack Lanka, now I just kinda want to kill you. P.S, my first gift of reasoned monster fish is currently swimming onto the land. In other games...   The day the golden calf of Berytos held back a carpet of ghost wolves shall go down in legend. I ended up with 11 HP at turn 100, about 95 turns after everything else had routed. The god killed most of those 150 soldiers by just spamming out shockwave whenever he wasn't too fatigued.
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Oct 6, 2014 00:33
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Smerdyakov posted:I'm Agratha and I invaded Lanka last turn hey we still had 3 turns of NAP left 
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Oct 6, 2014 01:04
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39 goddamn Sidhe Lords and that's not even all of it Why has that player not wiped me off the map yet?
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Oct 6, 2014 02:55
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Libluini; I read through your posts. For a freespawn gem driven economy, couldnt you just do your gold/resource vortex to ensure you have no gold, then make all your units sacred to ensure they don't desert? As for temples/forts, screw em. For dom, make your commanders create a low level candle push, like the prophet, pretender and that weird giant idol at the end of construction magic line. This will probably be unbalanced as hell, but maybe make the units weaker/only certain units have dompush. So make the balancing act between "Do I want useful commanders/units, or do I want dompush from my frail weak commanders?" That seems the easiest way to handle all the weird questions for a gem driven economy, though again I don't know how balanced it will be.
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Oct 6, 2014 04:25
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Donkringel posted:Libluini; The main issue with the income vortex is it makes the nation's cap a giant gently caress-you to anyone who captures it on a level that Ashen Emipre can only dream of.
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Oct 6, 2014 05:39
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RockyB posted:The fishmen are angry at you because you randomly, and without provocation, attacked Fomoria's capital while I was in the process of sieging it. So while I may have previously harboured intentions to attack Lanka, now I just kinda want to kill you. P.S, my first gift of reasoned monster fish is currently swimming onto the land. Heh, I did the same in my first UW game, one of my first GoR went to the same unit.
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Oct 6, 2014 09:07
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Flavahbeast posted:hey we still had 3 turns of NAP left I honestly lost track of it and thought it was up, sorry! I'll send you some items or gems as an apology, just let me know what you need. It can't be nothing ridiculous, but just enough to show remorse on my part.
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Oct 6, 2014 09:57
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Donkringel posted:Libluini; I'm working on this! Just as an update, I've settled on only draining a little bit of gold and res in EA, then the drain gets worse and worse through the ages, but the huge drain in LA is supposed to be set off by the huge amount of gems the sites give out. So if someone gets the cap, his income may drop by something like -1000 gold (work in progress) and he'll get barely enough ressources to recruit 1-2 units in that province. (Because I can't set res completely to zero if I want players to recruit the 3 flavour-recruitables LA Akkad still has.) The rest will be done on fine tuning after EA and MA are finished, because then I've tested most of my ideas and seen how well this works. Right now, to make the cap drain not silly and impossible to survive for other players taking it, I'll plan on making building costs the limiting factor: So most likely LA Akkad will still be able to occasionally build forts and temples, just not that many of them. Also I plan a summonable fort for LA Akkad, so a player can chose if he wants to use his limited gold for more forts or more temples. (And his gems for units or forts, of course.) In theory, some dastardly player could try to game this by just never building any forts, labs and temples (I'll even stick a summonable dom-push priest into LA Akkad to support this) so he can have a shitton of gold and a shitton of gems. Of course, many useful indeps need temples and labs anyway and LA Akkads recruitable units are poo poo, so a player would run out of money pretty fast. Which is by design, since you're supposed to be relying on gems, not gold. Now I guess I have to see how many silly loopholes I can find and fill in before throwing up test games. Oh, yeah: Finishing the mod would also be something I need to do.
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Oct 6, 2014 10:42
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Lprsti99 posted:The main issue with the income vortex is it makes the nation's cap a giant gently caress-you to anyone who captures it on a level that Ashen Emipre can only dream of. Is there no way to tag it to only apply to the first player in control of the cap?
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Oct 6, 2014 11:19
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No, there isn't like a #homescales command. e: That is one of the other alternatives, by the way, which is to make their pretenders cost much more points than normal so they have to take weaker scales.
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Oct 6, 2014 11:36
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Can you not give their national troops enormous upkeep, outside of summons? I mean, who wants to go to war with an army of indies?
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Oct 6, 2014 11:59
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Give them an immobile, immovable starting unit that has gigantic upkeep? I dunno.
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Oct 6, 2014 12:32
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scalded schlong posted:Can you not give their national troops enormous upkeep, outside of summons? I mean, who wants to go to war with an army of indies? This is one idea, yeah. But there aren't that many national troops around, so I plan on adding costs were I can. Right now, the balance is like that: EA Lagash: lovely units, good mages, summons. (Finished, except for the summons) MA Akkad: lovely units which are also slow, good mages, summons. LA Akkad: Joke units, summons. One of the joke units can summon, so a player using a dormant or imprisoned pretender isn't trapped. (I'm looking at you here, Lemuria. )AXE COP posted:Give them an immobile, immovable starting unit that has gigantic upkeep? I dunno. Holy loving poo poo, this is brilliant. I've to try and test this today. Edit: If this works, LA Akkad won't be able to build temples except for events and sites which build them automatically. To make sure LA Akkad has a chance of this happening, I'll add a common site giving a temple. The important point is: LA Akkads' temples will give extra gems (only to Akkad) in this case, since they'll be a rare site and abuse practically impossible. Also dom-push units, here we come! Libluini fucked around with this message at 12:49 on Oct 6, 2014 |
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Oct 6, 2014 12:40
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Yeah that would work, make their starting commander or scout a unique unit that is otherwise unavailable that has a large negative #gold stat. You'd need to make sure the unit is immobile and unteleportable like the monolith and even then I think there's a couple of ways to get the unit to move into an enemy province or otherwise get itself killed but they're all endgame stuff or require extensive expenditure in gems.
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Oct 6, 2014 12:42
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Libluini posted:Holy loving poo poo, this is brilliant. I've to try and test this today. Make it a giant crucible full of molten gold. Add text that explains that it fuels all summons by transforming molten gold into magic, as a sort of reverse alchemy.
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Oct 6, 2014 12:46
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Azram Legion posted:Make it a giant crucible full of molten gold. Add text that explains that it fuels all summons by transforming molten gold into magic, as a sort of reverse alchemy. You know what, that idea is good. I'll see what I can do.
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Oct 6, 2014 12:54
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The first thing that comes to mind is empowering the Golden Crucible to cast Transformation, but if you're rushing Alt 6 for that on a summon-focused nation you'll probably have other issues (I think?). Maybe give it some other benefit to make it worth keeping around regardless.
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Oct 6, 2014 13:19
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Neruz posted:Yeah that would work, make their starting commander or scout a unique unit that is otherwise unavailable that has a large negative #gold stat. You'd need to make sure the unit is immobile and unteleportable like the monolith and even then I think there's a couple of ways to get the unit to move into an enemy province or otherwise get itself killed but they're all endgame stuff or require extensive expenditure in gems. If it's made non-Unique then it can't be Wished away. Immobile/Unteleportable should mean it can't TP - can it still Faery Trod this way? The winged monkeys thing - would giving it (for example) Earth paths but then giving it a negative to that path still protect it as a mage? You could give it massive but negatived Nature paths to reduce the chance of transformation. For Astral Harpoon, I dunno, give it massive strength but a siege defence penalty to compensate? Or just have it be that if you can find the nature gems and it's really what you want to do with them, go ahead and transform it?
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Oct 6, 2014 13:20
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You'd want to give it a large penalty to all magic paths to prevent empowering and having it cast spells, having it be size 6 and have lots of HP+str should prevent astral harpoon\flying monkeys. But there's probably still a couple of weird corner cases that would let it escape to get itself killed. e: Could also make it generate some of the nation's cap gem income, that way if a cunning player works out a way to get it killed they lose some gem income as well.
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Oct 6, 2014 13:39
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