The new general "Dominions 5" Thread

[lord_khaine]

Since the last one fell off the map then i guess its time to make a new thread about my favorite niche game.
And to kick it off i give you the tale of my own last game.

The Rise and Fall of Fantasy Japan Jomon

Journal of Vizir BigHat, Chief Advisor of the Shogun.

Month 1-3
The Time of Changes is upon us! The Highest One, the Pankrator, has stopped responding to its priests.
And the most ancient one, slumbering beneath the dungeons of Castle Jomon has off, breaking several walls, countless expensive works of art, as well as both the Shogun and several of my esteeem collegues who were to slow to get out of the way.

Ahem.. so unfortunate..
A random Samurai has declared himself prophet, and are even now gathering the remnants of the Imperial Cavalery to sally out and claim the land surrounding us for our new lord, the Supreme Being.
Whereever it is now. It seemed to head towards the ocean, perhaps its thristy?


Month 4-6
Our new lord and savior have been confirmed to vanish down Lucky Lake, only to emerge a few months later, having done stars know what down there. All the same, the peasants are impressed, and its almost embarresing how little our regular army have done by comparison.

Though the cavalery have finally reached critical mass, and should make it possible to split off from the archers in a few months.


Month 7-9
Contact has been made with Ragda to the east and Marignon to the north. Ragda were very reasonable in explaning their desire for a border between us, not wanting people who could build a fort in the lake bordering their capital, to actually be able to do so. And so we peacefully split the provinces between us.

Marignon meanwhile responded to the suggestion of letting the river between us act like a natural border, by sailing across the river and taking the southern part of it. Some people would take that as a sign of agression. But im certain its just because they want to get to know us better.
So for that same reason The Supreme Being has crawled up from the western Ocean to impresse all the peasants of a rather major town just 2 months travel from Marignons capital..


Month 10-12
The negotiation with Marignon was tense, and war came on the table a few times. But in the end the argument that none of us can afford a war won though. And so we will concede the town that Supreme Being awed in return for the province north of Jomon.

Besides that things are progressing well. A Monk of the 5 paths have made contact with the sons of the Dragon King, dwelling in the grand western lake. They to have been awed by the majesty of the worlds largest phallos symbol, and so are going to join us. With that we now have 2 military centers. The cluster of dragon palaces hidden in the lake, and the double fort of North Jomon and South Jomon.

For the cavalery unit has proved their worth, lead by General Manti they have now a string of victories with minimal casulties. And so focus will move on to train a major force of them, when it comes to taking the 2 thrones located north and south of Jomon.

Eastward the prophet has subdued a tribe of predatory lizards, as well as a clan of Zhh.. zoors..? zons..? bat people. Their magical traditions will be studied, and potentially their shamans will be allowed to serve the supreme being.


Month 13
A new year dawns. The dawn of the dragon. 23 provinces have been converted to follow the Supreme being, and the first Riujin joins. Though the initial focus now needs to be avoiding attention from the fearful nations surrounding us.

Marignon to the north might be a blasted hellscape, but their fanatics simply refuses to die to anything besides direct decapitation, and spilling their blood invokes blood vengeance.

Midgard to the south west meanwhile has their vanir knights empowered by all paths of magic. Leaving them almost impossible to see or hit.

Ragda to the east though, is the most scary of them all, having ogre sized knights mounted atop dragon sized griffons.

Thankfully none of them seems to considder us a threat, and so seems receptive to the idea of simply leaving us for later.


Month 14
Luck has at last smiled upon the nation of Jomon, the imperial site searcher found found a single spot blessed with every element of the ring. Along with the curiously frozen flames a junior astrolog found in the eastern swarm, then our national gem income has more than doubled in a single day.

Meanwhile mounted samurai are getting into position to sweep clean the throne of death to the south west of Jomon. We really want the throne of Gaia to compliment it, but the titan of Marignon is getting dangerously close to that throne, perhaps diplomacy will be in order. We know they badly want the throne of law that lies in the lake beneath their own capital.


Month 15
Scouts bring trouble of war brewing to the north, semingly between the hellish blessed fanatics of Man and the giant berserkers of Utgard. Its a mess we are going to stay clear off.
And thankfully, it seems the Supreme One is at last returning from its little trip. Hopefully it has had enough to eat for now, because its presence beneath Castle Jomon will likely do a lot to deter invaders.

Thats especially important now as the dual Cavalry commanders Manti and Coran, along with Windsong the dragon, are circling the throne of dead, preparing for a pincer attack that should eleminate that stain on our nation.


Month 16-17
Crushing Victory, the hordes of the unclean dead were utterly decimated, and a mere 4 samurai horsemen died honorably in the process. This is a massive succes by any standard, and not just the moral one we usually have to use until our sages figure out how to make our warriors emply the arcane techology known as a –shield- in combat. Unfortunately the throne ended up only containing the unholy Lower Throne, a source of magic utterly forbidden in Jomon by penalty of death. We are not even certain its worth building a fort around it.

Oh well. On to the next one up north. Hopefully its going to be a little more useful.


Month 16
Glory to the brave warriors of Jomon! Losing a mere 4 men to the greater glory of the nation, they killed 4 times their own number. With only minimal support from a pair of wandering priests.

… just a shame it ended up hardly being worth it. The throne in question, the lower throne, is a horrible thing, mostly suited for the sort of unholy magic Jomon would newer sully its hands with publicly.

At least the throne to the north still have a chance of being something more useful to our cause.
More Ryujin are being lured up from the deep, by the promise of glory, and a chance to impress young jomonese girls.


Month 17-20
Another glorious victory.. or something. The hordes of vinemen guarding the throne were almost effordlessly squashed by a combination of Samurai cavalry and a unit of sharkmen. The only casulty of note being an unfortunate dragon who bravely charged the rear without the support of its lazy brethren.

Just sadly, it turned out to be the almost insignificant throne of storms. Ya! More air gems? What are we going to do with the stuff? Feed the Supreme Being in hope it will stop snacking on valuable furniture or priceless clay art? Hmm….

On a side note, the chief shugenja reports that our magical research is progressing almost after scedule, as we have just figured out home to summon swarmps of nasty bugs. He insists this will be of massive tactical advantage in the fight against just about everyone else who surrounds him. Well.. he is a dangerous madman who put honey in his tea, so i just smile and nod in hope it means he will go away faster.


Month 21-22
Unexpectedly, a gift fit for the emperor we no longer have arrived from the nation of Caelum. A massive amount of gems and gold, apperently send to empty their treasury before barbarian invaders can plunder it. Its quite unexpected, as we had not even heard the nation of Caelum were in trouble..

Alright back after shouting a bit at the scouts. Now its time to make plans for the future. Step one is to secure the lakes previously in Caelums control. A flight of Ryujin can only almost cross the 6 or so provinces they need to pass in order to reach those lakes.

Sight… i guess i need to ask the master Shugenja for help again…


Month 23
It has been explained to me that the solution is to fit each Ryujin with a pair of shoes?
Sight.. sometimes i wonder why i even bother asking. But the shoes looks fancy so the dragons love them.
Go figure. I will turn my attention towards the logistics of the trip, as well as of liberating the Caelum lakes.
Its important to ensure enough magical supplies are packed. And most embaresing, a minor mistake was made in not packing enough nature gems, so the trip is delayed a month.

To make matters worse, the proud nation of Jomon has been ranked as a minor power?!
The insult almost make me crack my favorite cup. Fortunately a solution is at hand, in the shape of the ninja clans we have recently recruited.


Month 25
It took a little bit of preparation to get the dragons launched, in the end new boots was enough to send 6 of them ½ across the world into a pond formerly owned by Caelum. Turns out there is a reason for why Ryujin are rulers of the Jomon see. 3 dragons was all it took for each section of the lake.

Now that they are there they might as well get into position to grab a bit of land. At the moment the world is partly distracted by the massive war between Mictlan, Atlantis and Agartha. We will use this oppotunity to grow stronger. And perhaps also to do something about Mictlan and their tasteless use of blood magic.


Month 26
The honerless landgrab continues. It does not sit well with the samura, but thankfully we can explain it away as seasonal dragon migration, while packs of Ryujin takes over former Caelum provinces.
Midgar and Marignon is quite occupied with sieging down the citadels, but thats fine. They can have those. Meanwhile the dragons are constructing a spring palace down the lake.


Month 27
Report has reached of Atlantis falling to the combined efford of Ragda and Mictlan? The rapport were a little unreliable. But what is known is that this is a unpreceded opportunity. With another water power down the number of people who can oppose the Ryujin in the sea has shrunked down to Mictlan, kind off?
And so another flight of dragons are send to take over the now vacated lake.

Meanwhile we prepare for the potential war against Mictlan. They are far, far to dangerous. Someone need to stop them before their use of forbidden blood magic escalates. Prefebly someone else. Like Ragda or Mictlan. Two nations with an uncomfortable degree of power.
Hmm.. the idea situation is a war between those power that weaken all, while we gently invite Agartha into the proud Jomonese Nation.

Month 30
Wind of Spring Dawns New
Your last sunset nears
-Cencored- Flying Felines

Not one of my better pieces, but i think it gets the idea across.
It has been send to the nation of Mictlan. They are to big a risk in the long run with their potential for blood magic. Since Ragda moves in now, then its the perfect time to strike as well.
If we end Mictlan Ragda can be given credit for the deed.

The army moves into position as i write this. A large force of cavalry to the east, supported by archers. A large force of sharkmen to the west. Supported by fish men.
Those are the feint. 20 Ryujin gathers in their lake, preparing for a massive strike against around 10 different provinces.


Month 31
When it rain in this cursed land, it rains toads.. typical!
Just as i challenged Mictlan, Marignon challenges me. Its the M&M gang..
I have already yelled for the head Shugenja. We have 3 months to figure out what we can do against Marignons cursed flagellants and their hellish bless.


Month 34
I made a gross miscalculation, and it might end up costing us all the gains made so far. The war against Mictlan progressed well enough, with lightning raids from the sacred water dragons taking large swathes of land. But when challenged by Mictlan, i foolishly though that a quick initial strike would scare them off.
Just sadly failing to take into account the large number of hellblessed zealots they have roaming the land.
And so the number of dragons were insufficient, and lead to large loses that will take at least a couple months to recover from.

Now im forced to make peace with Mictlan to focus on this new threat, since a massive Marignon army moves towards my capital. God has been petitioned to move out and stare at them a bit, and the Head Shugenja has promised to cook up a little surprise for them as well. So far his attempts at making acid elementals have failed though, and the latest batch also looks more like jelly than water.

And in the end, i start to fear all of this isnt enough. We got barrels of unholy blood from the cursed throne we took. Initially to keep it out of the hands of everyone else. But now, ancestors have mercy, i think it has become nececary to put it to use. Somehow. However you actually do so. Dam thing did not come with a manual..


Month 36
War, war newer changes.
The raiding has been fierce, its a problem when 10 unarmored fanatics and a single preacher can sail over and beat down reguar province milita. So far its been hard to find a counter for that, besides increasing province spendings.

The living acid blobs worked moderatly well, but ran into the problem so many other things face, that spilling the blood of Marignon fanatics invokes a blood curse that kills most normal men. The first major army that Marignon send were in part only turned back by the grace of god, whom valiantly ate some fifty fanatics or so before the rest eventually broke.

Though now that the field is littered with the dead, a new plan has taken form. From the Ravens feasting on those, dead gems have been harvested. And a expert on the unclean death magic has been recruited to do something with it that i hope will be a bigger surprise, than flying acid blobs.

On another note, bathing the head Shugenja in unholy blood did not seem to turn him (more) crazy, and actually improved slightly on the smell. He seems to have gotten an affinity for it now. But it will be a long while before he can do anything useful. So it wont make a difference in this war.

Though it is one where we need to act fast. Marignon has broken the ultimate taboo, and invoked the horror! Of the astral plane. The Supreme being has already been marked by them. This can of course now only end with the utter destruction of their nation.


Month 38
Oh Supreme Being.. and all the Ancestors.. directing this war is giving me migraine..
But i cant leave the task to the generals, who dont know anything about magic. Or to the Head Shugenja who is a raving madman, lately he has taken to dying his beard pink. I dont dare to ask why..

Though the plan for the Great Jomon offensive is finally done. The center will be held by the Supreme Being and a assorted bunch of rabble. As well as our new acid elementals. They are painstakingly slow, but that problem has been solved by catapults and a bit of air magic.

East our subjogated tribes of lizard warriors will handle the brunt of the fighting, protected by both their own shamans and a few astrologers.

And west a small elite force of Shark men and Ryujin, again supported by an astrologer to ward against evil magic, has just emerged from the sea to take a province. But this time, instead of falling back, they are going to drive deeper into Marignons domain, and link up with the Sea King we have bribed in the northenwest lakes of Marignom.


Month 40.
Setback upon setback. The western force got ambushed by a massive Marignon army, after a sudden attack of astral horrors had baited their gems out. The loss of our troops were bad enough, but the loss of 8 Riujin were far, far worse.

The Eastern force meanwhile, managed to get baited into attacking the titan of Marignon, Jorgen Muppet, and suffered horrible casualties before withdrawing back to our keep.

Now, while under siege by a fallen angel with a redicoulus name, then the time has come for a final gamble.
An elite Squad of air dragons have been armed with massive greatswords, and launches themselves against the mad titan, while the remnants of the East and central army makes a push forward into Marignon.


Month 45.
5 months of intense raiding back and forth has followed. The attack on Jorgen the Titan failed, in part due to the entire team getting stunned by a storm spool. A new force should have been prepared, but they got tied up fending of raids from Marignons fallen angels.

Now Marignon made their own move, and placed the capital under siege. Thanks to Cliffscale the Ryujins heroic sacrifice i know their rather simple plan. Charge in around 500 flaggelants under the protection of Mistform.

Its also a plan thats immensely hard to counter though, as this combined with their blessing makes them more or less impossible to kill. So this will be the last entry unless a solution is found.

[Glimbur]

Sounds like you got a little adventurous with ryujin, lost a pile raiding, and then got turned on. Poison cloud and sleep cloud might have handled the flagellants, at least with some blockers to slow them down. Lucky militia or earth elementals or whatever. Maybe you should have left the thrones alone and gone for a player? All your neighbors were kind of scary though.

[lord_khaine]

Well.. no.. its actually not even the case that i got turned on.


https://i.imgur.com/Evb5chX.png


The Ryujin performance were god-like.
I think i lost around 1 out of 8 in the initial strike against Mictlan, so that war were going well.
But i made a fatal flaw when i launched them into Marignon's domain, and forgot that
a) he had Drain 3, so they spellcasting were nerfed.
b) had his realm overrun by rowing bands of hell blessed flaggelans.
(Marignon's bless were Awe, regeneration, Undying 10 and Blood Vengeance)
So a single Ryujin were not enough to take Marignons provinces.

And yeah sending a lot of troops to support a Ryujin attack would perhaps have helped earlier.
But the border between our realms were patroled by his titan


https://i.imgur.com/Wd2sTFr.png


So the first army i send after him ran into this ugly guy, and got more or less decimated.
I tried sending 3 Ryujin with greatswords after him, but they failed.
And before i could gather a stronger force to try again, then i were suddenly under attack myself, by Fallen Angels.

https://i.imgur.com/TAwHspT.png

So a lot of Dragons suddenly have their hands full kicking those off my land.

Going for the scattered thrones were not an issue though. We had 24 throne points, and 18 is required to win.

[Glimbur]

Best of luck. I have a soft spot for Jomon, they are less evil than most LA nations.

[Manticoran]

As the mictlan, I have comments, but I think I'll hold them until the game is actually over, as I think I'd give stuff away that are still in progress.

[lord_khaine]

Best of luck. I have a soft spot for Jomon, they are less evil than most LA nations.

Yeah. They dont use blood magic.
Or eat you. The worst they do in general is to tax you if your a peasant.
I mean you could be drafted to the army. But militia is so crappy that its a waste of gold :P

And thank you. Sadly i am likely out of the running for winning this game.
At this stage its more a degree of spite that makes me try and see just how long i can hold out.
And just how much damage i can do.


As the mictlan, I have comments, but I think I'll hold them until the game is actually over, as I think I'd give stuff away that are still in progress.

I am curious about those.
Since it kinda have to be a secret weapon not yet blown.

[deuterio12]

Congratulations to lord_khaine for making the meme build of dragon fleet Jomon get so far, which usually remains only in theory as they get crushed early on due to some of the crappiest land troops around.

[tyckspoon]

Well. Vengeance)
So a single Ryujin were not enough to take Marignons provinces.

And yeah sending a lot of troops to support a Ryujin attack would perhaps have helped earlier.
But the border between our realms were patroled by his titan


https://i.imgur.com/Wd2sTFr.png


So the first army i send after him ran into this ugly guy, and got more or less decimated.
I tried sending 3 Ryujin with greatswords after him, but they failed.
And before i could gather a stronger force to try again, then i were suddenly under attack myself, by Fallen Angels.
.

Target defense skill: 28. Base Ryujin attack: 12. You either needed to send enough after him that harassment penalties made him hittable or go for magic attacks. Water elemental or Frozen Heart spam would do the job in sufficient numbers.

Edit: didn't notice the general element resists. Frozen Heart would still do it, but it's be very inefficient trying to wear through the regen as well.

[lord_khaine]

Congratulations to lord_khaine for making the meme build of dragon fleet Jomon get so far, which usually remains only in theory as they get crushed early on due to some of the crappiest land troops around.

Thanks a lot :smallbiggrin:
And yeah, for a few short months i lived the Jomon dream.
It even lasted a little bit into the war. Just sucked being up against one of the worst counters.
Where drain 3 made spellcasters suck. And horror attacks made sending small groups of dragons anywhere risky.
By the time i had learned to deal with those it were to late.


Target defense skill: 28. Base Ryujin attack: 12. You either needed to send enough after him that harassment penalties made him hittable or go for magic attacks. Water elemental or Frozen Heart spam would do the job in sufficient numbers.

Edit: didn't notice the general element resists. Frozen Heart would still do it, but it's be very inefficient trying to wear through the regen as well.

Well the difference isnt that big.
Base Ryujin 12
greatsword of sharpness +4
Quicken self +2
Ring of the warrior +5
Thats a starting value of 23. And adding to that each Ryujin has 4 attacks each.
Of course, i decided to go for overkill, and added a stonebird. Thats 10 additional attacks.
Just unfortunately, it didnt work, they all got stunned during round 2 by the storm spool. And killed by the fire shield.

Frozen heart or water elementals were also unlikely to do anything. He were regenerating 20%, so likely the blood vengeance would have done more damage to the mages.
Perhaps an absurdly high number of water elementals would have done it as well against version 1.0. But they would have had to do a lot of damage to burn though the regen.
And a magic weapon were needed because he had a minion who cast Body Etheral on him.

[zlefin]

general question: is the ai any better at building thugs/scs than it was in dom4 (i.e. terrible and inept)

[lord_khaine]

Dont know..
Its why i began playing human opponents.
Even if they suck as well! Im looking at you Marignon!

[Knaight]

It's really not. The AI is getting a lot better at handling armies with minimal magic support than it used to be (the endless militia waves of Dom 3 are a thing of the past), but it's still pretty terrible once the magic system gets brought in, especially items.

[Glimbur]

Anyone like any mods? I am getting into Dominions Enhanced. I also am considering a build your own nation game for next game I play, based on an idea from someone on a discord server (Bloax). It would probably be months out yet though.

[tyckspoon]

Anyone like any mods? I am getting into Dominions Enhanced. I also am considering a build your own nation game for next game I play, based on an idea from someone on a discord server (Bloax). It would probably be months out yet though.

Recently installed Dominions Enhanced, been playing pilot single-player games with the added nations.

Edit: Most of the nations have some interesting aspects, but they're not really grabbing me more or less than the base nations. Enjoying messing around with the Pretenders Enhanced titans, tho. Makes most of the Titan class more viable, and almost all the Monsters have changes to make them at least somewhat viable expanders - improved base Protection generally across the board, a second or third attack so they can clear mobs faster, Awe and/or Fear, and they almost all have Recuperation as baseline.

I haven't run most of the games up to highest levels yet, so can't render an opinion on the higher-level spell additions. On the low level spells, I think the big standout is having a smaller area/non-gem using version of Fire Arrows, so you can set up effective archer swarms much sooner and with less required specialist mages. I don't play underwater nations much, but if you enjoy them you'll probably appreciate all the new underwater combat spells giving your mages something else to do other than wait until Water Elementals happen.

[Glimbur]

I like all the options DE adds to water. Summer rain to help with fatigue, water weird for body guarding, creeping ichor to assassinate... it's nice.

[Manticoran]

I'm actually writing a pair of mods, one set up for balancing pretenders around a 190pt Kerberus as minimally as possible(Make fewer changes, make sure changes that are made are obvious whenever possible, and make thematic sense), and one around balancing the nations some, again with the same design philosophy of minimal changes. Ah, also a note that we're trying to do more buffs than nerfs, as nerfs feel bad, but people are almost always happy to have buffs.

Some broad strokes on what we've done regarding Pretenders: Titans are generally cheaper, and if represented on their model have bad gear. Death related titans often have invuln.

Messengers have affliction resistance, monsters have recup, immobiles are all 100 points with innate domspread, most mages are 0 points.

Nation changes are usually minor mage changes, but we have a couple species wide changes(Abysians can get 5 years older before they're old, Caelians get a couple stat buffs across the board, as dom5 was not kind to them now that flying lance chargers don't always hit first.)

We've set up a discord for talking about it, if people are interested? We're about to start a 6 player FFA.

I found that a lot of mods add what I consider to be "too much", where I start wondering about everything they're doing.

[lord_khaine]

Yeah i took at look at Dominions enhanced.
But though it went a little to far overboard with the spells it added.
The more you give to a single path, the more you erase the differences between each path.

[deuterio12]

My personal peeve with DE is more with all the national spells it adds so basically every nation is abusing their own special snowflake magic instead of most everybody sharing the same pool of spells for most stuff which to me is one of the main charms of dominions, most everybody having an idential spell library with only a few national spells here and there. Figuring out what will work best for each scenario. Instead DE is all "lol just go with those custom tailored spells for your nation."

[lord_khaine]

I do like the idea of having a small handful of unique summons and spells.
But while the conjuration spells could and should be better than default conjuration summons,
Then i do agree on that combat spells most of the time should only be situational useful.
With of course noteable exceptions like the Marveni Tatoo ones.
Or i guess the Xibalba soul ones are also an example of national spells done right.

[Manticoran]

I do like the idea of having a small handful of unique summons and spells.
But while the conjuration spells could and should be better than default conjuration summons,
Then i do agree on that combat spells most of the time should only be situational useful.
With of course noteable exceptions like the Marveni Tatoo ones.
Or i guess the Xibalba soul ones are also an example of national spells done right.

I think the Caelian national paralyze spell is a good example of what NOT to do, as a note, for most circumstances.

It makes a crosspath (Air/Death) that previously blew to get at 1/1, suddenly a very powerful combat path. I'm ok with the devs doing that, but unless the nation has problems utilizing their mages at all, I could never justify modding something in so incredibly gamechanging.

[lord_khaine]

Hmm.. yeah.. im alright with some path combinations not being good for combat casting.
Its not like there isnt plenty of other tasks for a low level mage. Like forging, researching or site searching.

[Glimbur]

I'm working on an ambitious mod to make 3 eras of pokemon. I mostly have the planning for the first era done, but I think I want a chaff pokemon. Should I just use rattata, or is there another choice?
Other pokemon are the 3 original starters, pikachu, geodude or sandslash, and maybe dratini. Or dratini might be summon and pretender spawn only, not sure.

[Manticoran]

Like nations themed around pokemon?

[Glimbur]

Exactly. The first nation will have all the recruitable commanders as humans and all the units as pokemon. Events and XP shape will let top level pokemon become mages. Later eras will play with that approach somewhat.

[Knaight]

I'm working on an ambitious mod to make 3 eras of pokemon. I mostly have the planning for the first era done, but I think I want a chaff pokemon. Should I just use rattata, or is there another choice?
Other pokemon are the 3 original starters, pikachu, geodude or sandslash, and maybe dratini. Or dratini might be summon and pretender spawn only, not sure.

Caterpie, weedle, and the rest of the grubs come to mind as chaff units.

[Glimbur]

Caterpie, weedle, and the rest of the grubs come to mind as chaff units.

Those could work too. It would be amusing to have your chaff turn into kakuna between fights. I would give them map move to represent being carried so it's not the worst thing but would still cause issues. I am worried that getting the fliers for final step of evolution is too good for chaff.

[tyckspoon]

Those could work too. It would be amusing to have your chaff turn into kakuna between fights. I would give them map move to represent being carried so it's not the worst thing but would still cause issues. I am worried that getting the fliers for final step of evolution is too good for chaff.

Nazca and Xibalba already have swarms and swarms of crappy flyers to use as chaff, Pangaea has harpies; it's generally not considered the strong point of those nations. I wouldn't expect it to be a problem, especially since the life of chaff swarms tends to be short, brutal, and not rich in XP - unless you use a really low requirement for the xpshapes you probably aren't gonna get a lot of your front line blockers surviving to third stage. (Maybe more possible if you have a capsite that can be entered for XP training? PokeArena, have a recruitable commander Trainer that can enter with his troops for XP? Basically cloning the function from the similar magic site.) Might be something to consider if your third-stage 'chaff' evolutions are also available as relatively massable summons, tho - a national summon spell that creates a swarm of Beedrill or Butterfree could mean you'd need to be more careful what you did with their stats. (recent patch made sleep aura a moddable function, so you could have Butterfree with 'Sleep Powder'..) Heck, you could actually just sprite-swap Zotz and call them Zubats.

For recruitable chaff, just about any of the first-route trash pokemon should work ok. I'd pick based on the stats you want them to have; something that is intended to swarm around and die in droves with generally crappy stats would call for a different 'mon than something that should be mainly capable of standing in a line and absorbing arrows while the mages warm up.

[deuterio12]

Pidgeys and Sparrows for cheap flying chaff.

Zubats should have mind-blasts to represent Supersonic.

[Olinser]

Pidgeys and Sparrows for cheap flying chaff.

Zubats should have mind-blasts to represent Supersonic.

Pikachu should be the cheapest most disposable chaff just so we can watch armies of them die.

[deuterio12]

Pikachu freespawn so it's not optional to have hordes of them die. They'll be all over your provinces whetever you like it or not.

Plus summon horde of pikachus national spell that the AI always prioritizes.

Also mandatory to include the generation I pokemon death fainting cries in battle.

Legendaries can be the high level unique summons.

You could actually make multiple factions with pokemon, each based in an element/gym/city from the game plus even a Team Rocket nation with stealthy unrest generating trainers!

So like Petwer Town faction that gets a bunch of rock pokemons and Brock as a national hero.

[Glimbur]

It would be interesting to have enough nations to have an all pokemon game. I do not have the time or ambition for that, but once the first mod is released it could serve as a base for more. I expect I am a couple months out at least, depends how quickly the Dominions game I am waiting on gets started. At least the sprite work is pretty easy.

[Manticoran]

It would be interesting to have enough nations to have an all pokemon game. I do not have the time or ambition for that, but once the first mod is released it could serve as a base for more. I expect I am a couple months out at least, depends how quickly the Dominions game I am waiting on gets started. At least the sprite work is pretty easy.

I can help with the unit work if you want, I'm very familiar with monster, site, and nation modifications, although less so with sprites and spells.

I am SUPER in for like, type or gym themed nations, with the different ages as different pokemon games.

[Glimbur]

I want to figure out the event scripting to turn units into commanders at a specific site, and spells that make sites. After that I could send you the (very) rough draft so you can start diversifying the pokemon list and making many nations. I'm a little surprised by how much enthusiasm there is for this idea, we might get a non-standard game out of it!

[deuterio12]

It would be interesting to have enough nations to have an all pokemon game. I do not have the time or ambition for that, but once the first mod is released it could serve as a base for more. I expect I am a couple months out at least, depends how quickly the Dominions game I am waiting on gets started. At least the sprite work is pretty easy.

Which program are you using for making/editing sprites? Any nice guides online?

Asking because I would really love to do some sprites myself and tried using multiple tools but just can't seem to get the hang of it.

[Glimbur]

I use paint.net. I find it easier to understand than gimp and unlike paint3D it can make tga files as required. For the pokemon mod I have been taking existing sprites and rescaling them to the right size and format. Otherwise I usually take an existing dominions sprite and fiddle with details.

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=42737
Is one Sprite guide

[Manticoran]

I want to figure out the event scripting to turn units into commanders at a specific site, and spells that make sites. After that I could send you the (very) rough draft so you can start diversifying the pokemon list and making many nations. I'm a little surprised by how much enthusiasm there is for this idea, we might get a non-standard game out of it!

Look, you said the word Pokemon.

I've got a discord for doing dominions modding projects, do you want to join? That way we could coordinate easier with real-time text. We should do a centralized file to edit too so we make sure we don't duplicate work.

[deuterio12]

I use paint.net. I find it easier to understand than gimp and unlike paint3D it can make tga files as required. For the pokemon mod I have been taking existing sprites and rescaling them to the right size and format. Otherwise I usually take an existing dominions sprite and fiddle with details.

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=42737
Is one Sprite guide

Thanks, trying it out and indeed seems much simpler to use than gimp so far!

[Glimbur]

I got the events working, so the remaining work is just making units and writing descriptions. Hopefully I can have an alpha test ready in another week or two, depending on if my next dominins game starts soon.

We can also argue about balance: right now the magic looks like EA Tien Chi but better. The five elements (earth water air fire wod/nature), you get a pokemon that casts one each at 3 (maybe only air 2). Humans have one path at 2 and another at 1, random so they could also have a 3. Cap only humans will have same magic but either +1 master ritualist or +1 master smith. Broader but less deep than most EA nations. Thoughts?

[tyckspoon]

I got the events working, so the remaining work is just making units and writing descriptions. Hopefully I can have an alpha test ready in another week or two, depending on if my next dominins game starts soon.

We can also argue about balance: right now the magic looks like EA Tien Chi but better. The five elements (earth water air fire wod/nature), you get a pokemon that casts one each at 3 (maybe only air 2). Humans have one path at 2 and another at 1, random so they could also have a 3. Cap only humans will have same magic but either +1 master ritualist or +1 master smith. Broader but less deep than most EA nations. Thoughts?

Having a path at level 3 recruitable is generally what I'd consider quite good access to that path - it will let you cast or bootstrap up to almost everything relevant in that path, as well as being able to site search without fear of missing sites and having to search again later with a higher path or use searching spells. It's a bit weaker without certain crosspaths (ie, Fire + Death so you can make Flaming Skulls - without that your 'easiest' Flame booster item requires already having a very high path mage + a ton of gems, and Air just doesn't have easy boosters at all) but if you have a nation that has reliable, native level 3 mages without requiring communions or randoms I'd consider that quite powerful.

Master Ritualist and Master Smith can have negative values - if you're wanting certain things to be mainly battlefield mages you can use that to restrict them. You could also give Pokemon restricted equipment slots - rings/misc + crown-only head slot is pretty common on monster Pretenders, for example, and would lock out most boosting gear (also strongly restricting trying to turn them into thugs or super combatants, which may or may not be desirable.)

[Olinser]

I got the events working, so the remaining work is just making units and writing descriptions. Hopefully I can have an alpha test ready in another week or two, depending on if my next dominins game starts soon.

We can also argue about balance: right now the magic looks like EA Tien Chi but better. The five elements (earth water air fire wod/nature), you get a pokemon that casts one each at 3 (maybe only air 2). Humans have one path at 2 and another at 1, random so they could also have a 3. Cap only humans will have same magic but either +1 master ritualist or +1 master smith. Broader but less deep than most EA nations. Thoughts?

Well that depends on how far into the 'theme' you want to go and how much you're willing to change.

They've got 3 types of leadership already - normal, magic, undead. Add 2 more and turn them into Elemental leadership.

If you want to go full Pokemon theme then everybody should have access to every Pokemon but each square has different ones and some are available only through rare sites, but the elements all take different leadership so they'll be much more/less effective under certain trainers.

As for magic, you should have 'levels' of trainers/pokemon and as they get higher level they cost much more but have much more magic. Like a level 1 trainer should only have 1 level of 1 magic, a level 50 trainer should have L2/L3 in multiple paths.

Higher level pokemon can only be summoned by trainers entering sites requiring higher level magic of that path.

[Glimbur]

I like the idea of using negative master smith and master ritualist so the humans and pokemon both have a role. Terrain recruit for pokemon is very thematic but difficult to balance. I have some leveling included but it is not nearly as emphasized as in pokemon games.

[Olinser]

I like the idea of using negative master smith and master ritualist so the humans and pokemon both have a role. Terrain recruit for pokemon is very thematic but difficult to balance. I have some leveling included but it is not nearly as emphasized as in pokemon games.

Not leveling as in they actually need experience.

But like a Pikachu square for instance could have like 5 different 'levels' of it.

Level 1 Pikachu costs 5g and has no magic
Level 10 Pikachu costs 20g, has better stats, but still no magic
Level 20 Pikachu costs 75g and has L1 magic
Level 50 Pikachu costs 200g and has L2 magic
Level 100 Raichu costs 400g and has much higher stats across the board and L3 magic.

Just an example.

[Manticoran]

I really like the idea of Trainers having no more than 1-2 in any path, but having master ritualist/forger if they should have more.

That way they're your best out of combat support, but are generally kind of garbage in combat. And it should only be the like, Master Trainers that have 2 in any path. Maybe basic level trainers with 1 in one path, Intermediate Trainers with 1 in 1 path, but Master Ritualist 1/Master Forger 1, and Masters maybe go 2/1 for pathing.

[lord_khaine]

I kinda like the idea of making it part of a nation pack.
It would likely make for some more interesting choices as well, if this does not need to balance against a regular Dom 5 nation.

[Aeson]

I really like the idea of Trainers having no more than 1-2 in any path, but having master ritualist/forger if they should have more.

That way they're your best out of combat support, but are generally kind of garbage in combat.
X2 isn't "generally kind of garbage in combat," it's usually the mainstay of your battlemage corps for most paths, because it's generally readily available, relatively inexpensive, and good enough to cast most of its path's core battle magic - a lot of which often benefits more from having a lot of casters than from having a few very powerful casters. Most of the battle magic that an X2 cannot or should not cast is stuff that isn't likely to be cast more than once or twice in a battle anyways - battlefield enchants, wide-area buffs, major summons like Living [Element] that require quite a bit of investment to cast with anything other than your nation's biggest recruitable mages and are almost guaranteed to put them to sleep for the rest of the battle, et cetera.

[Manticoran]

X2 isn't "generally kind of garbage in combat," it's usually the mainstay of your battlemage corps for most paths, because it's generally readily available, relatively inexpensive, and good enough to cast most of its path's core battle magic - a lot of which often benefits more from having a lot of casters than from having a few very powerful casters. Most of the battle magic that an X2 cannot or should not cast is stuff that isn't likely to be cast more than once or twice in a battle anyways - battlefield enchants, wide-area buffs, major summons like Living [Element] that require quite a bit of investment to cast with anything other than your nation's biggest recruitable mages and are almost guaranteed to put them to sleep for the rest of the battle, et cetera.

Well yes, but X2Y1 for your high end expensive STR mage is kind of garbage in combat, but having X3Y2 for forging/rituals is quite good, particularly if you have a few variations on it.

[Aeson]

Well yes, but X2Y1 for your high end expensive STR mage is kind of garbage in combat, but having X3Y2 for forging/rituals is quite good, particularly if you have a few variations on it.
I'd debate the "expensive" part; STR X2Y1 with Master Smith/Ritualist 1 is basically the same as Vanheim's Dwarven Smiths, and they're only 140 gold. Not at all bad, especially considering you're only paying the recruitment costs every other turn, or maybe twice every three turns if you have a fort with three commander points.

It's also still worth it if it's your only good way to get a useful path combination into battle, though unless they're recruit-anyfort/anywhere it'd probably have to be for something that you don't need a lot of casters for.

[deuterio12]

X2 isn't "generally kind of garbage in combat," it's usually the mainstay of your battlemage corps for most paths, because it's generally readily available, relatively inexpensive, and good enough to cast most of its path's core battle magic - a lot of which often benefits more from having a lot of casters than from having a few very powerful casters. Most of the battle magic that an X2 cannot or should not cast is stuff that isn't likely to be cast more than once or twice in a battle anyways - battlefield enchants, wide-area buffs, major summons like Living [Element] that require quite a bit of investment to cast with anything other than your nation's biggest recruitable mages and are almost guaranteed to put them to sleep for the rest of the battle, et cetera.

120% true. I once won a MP game with a mod nation that had only either astral 2/death 1, or death 2/nature 1, or Nature 2/astral 1 mages with a 10% chance for +1 in either of their paths, anything more powerful only by spending gems, and said basic mages carried me to victory once I got some research going by spamming cheap astral/nature/death spells (stellar cascades, mind burn, skelly spam, nether bolts, that death blast, swarm, protection, breath of the dragon, etc) and the occasional communion.

This is also one of the reasons I suggested a pokemon nation for each gym/element/city, because otherwise you have an excuse to cram every magic path at decent level and that's pretty brutal. Tien Chi is held back by only really having lv1 magic on most paths outside their cap mages, but a nation that can reliably spam any type of mage at level 2 for combat would be extremely powerful unless the troops are complete garbage or something.

So if you're cramming every type of magic in the same nation, recruit-anywhere mages should only get lv1 magic outside of rare randoms.

[Glimbur]

On the other hand, look at arcosephale. They have recruit everywhere mystics with guaranteed S and some shots at SWEF. The proposed pokemon are X3 but take 60 XP to get there (pikachu A2 for 40 XP) and the humans are X2Y1 with a 20% chance of them lining up for X3. Most importantly they get no blood, astral, or death. Earth is also strong but the lack of any armor makes Legions of steel useless.

I think we'll have to see the nation as a whole to evaluate it. They do have pretty good fort recruit mages and potential thug chassis but with some caveats. Maybe the diversity is too much but I don't want to make several nations right now.

[deuterio12]

On the other hand, look at arcosephale. They have recruit everywhere mystics with guaranteed S and some shots at SWEF. The proposed pokemon are X3 but take 60 XP to get there (pikachu A2 for 40 XP) and the humans are X2Y1 with a 20% chance of them lining up for X3. Most importantly they get no blood, astral, or death. Earth is also strong but the lack of any armor makes Legions of steel useless.

I think we'll have to see the nation as a whole to evaluate it. They do have pretty good fort recruit mages and potential thug chassis but with some caveats. Maybe the diversity is too much but I don't want to make several nations right now.

Arco is precisely a fine example of "excellent mages, crapish troops". Mystics are a serious candidate for best non-cap mages in the whole game. But they're significantly held back by so-so national troops and no thug chassis either.

Even if they get no blood/astral/death, something like MA Ulm shows that simple E2/something 1 mages can be pretty brutal. Summon Earth power and then go to town with magma spells, Strength of Giants, Blade Wind, Marble Warriors, Rain of Stones, Earth Meld, Maws of the Earth, etc. Lack of Legions of Steel is hardly a problem. Lots of A2 mages spamming lighting wins games. Fire 2 goes to town with Phoenix power then fire elemental spam or plain blasting. W2 is for quickening and ice strike and fighting underwater. I'm hardly taking in account any crosspaths here.

And you don't need to make multiple nations at once, just pick your favorite element/city/gym and start there.

Or if you really insist in 20% of non-cap mages to get level 3 magic in one of 5 paths of your choice, then at least add the terrain limitations mentioned before (with the cap able to recruit any).

Forests-Nature.
Coast-Water.
Mountains-earth.
Wasteland-fire.
Plains-Air.

There, at least that way you can't just spam the right element to hard counter your current opponent.

[Manticoran]

Arco is precisely a fine example of "excellent mages, crapish troops". Mystics are a serious candidate for best non-cap mages in the whole game. But they're significantly held back by so-so national troops and no thug chassis either.

A note that I strongly disagree on this. Mystics are fairly meh in Dom5(They're significantly stronger in dom4, and ludicrously stronger in dom3), being strongly outperformed by mages like Guru for Astral, and most X2Y1 mages being flat better than them in my opinion, such as Witch Hunters, Caelian Seraphs, and the aforementioned Ulm Smiths.

[Aeson]

On average, 25% of Mystics are S2, 12.5% are F2, 12.5% are W2, 12.5% are E2, and the remaining 37.5% have no paths above 1. Mystics are good mostly because Communions are good; if you for some reason aren't using Communions, or if we're dealing with a hypothetical Mystic-like mage who had the same randoms but who traded guaranteed S1 away for a guaranteed level of A/N/D, cost reduction, or some ability that isn't a guaranteed path-level, they'd be a lot worse because their path combinations are unreliable and a lot of them aren't natively strong enough in any path or combination of paths to make good battle mages without some form of gem investment.

Also, I agree with Manticoran - in general, I would much rather have an X2Y1 mage with guaranteed paths than Mystics upon which to base my battle mage corps. Mystics aren't particularly powerful Communion Masters, the variability of their paths often means that the ones that become Communion Slaves tend to be exhausted rapidly, and Communions can be somewhat iffy for X2/X3 battle magic, especially if you're relatively unlucky and don't get any Mystics with more than 1 level in whatever path you're looking to cast from, because X2/X3 battle magic tends to want many casters, and a Communion with many masters and few slaves exhausts its slaves rapidly while a more balanced Communion requires a lot more mages to get the same number of active casters. A guaranteed specific X2Y1 combination might be more predictable, but it's easier to plan around and doesn't cost you a decent chunk of your mage corps in Communion Slaves.

[Manticoran]

On average, 25% of Mystics are S2, 12.5% are F2, 12.5% are W2, 12.5% are E2, and the remaining 37.5% have no paths above 1. Mystics are good mostly because Communions are good; if you for some reason aren't using Communions, or if we're dealing with a hypothetical Mystic-like mage who had the same randoms but who traded guaranteed S1 away for a guaranteed level of A/N/D, cost reduction, or some ability that isn't a guaranteed path-level, they'd be a lot worse because their path combinations are unreliable and a lot of them aren't natively strong enough in any path or combination of paths to make good battle mages without some form of gem investment.

Also, I agree with Manticoran - in general, I would much rather have an X2Y1 mage with guaranteed paths than Mystics upon which to base my battle mage corps. Mystics aren't particularly powerful Communion Masters, the variability of their paths often means that the ones that become Communion Slaves tend to be exhausted rapidly, and Communions can be somewhat iffy for X2/X3 battle magic, especially if you're relatively unlucky and don't get any Mystics with more than 1 level in whatever path you're looking to cast from, because X2/X3 battle magic tends to want many casters, and a Communion with many masters and few slaves exhausts its slaves rapidly while a more balanced Communion requires a lot more mages to get the same number of active casters. A guaranteed specific X2Y1 combination might be more predictable, but it's easier to plan around and doesn't cost you a decent chunk of your mage corps in Communion Slaves.

An additional note that relying on communions also has a serious time cost in combat, as your opponent starts throwing kill spells potentially immediately, so there's a greater chance with matrixing everyone up that some critical part of your communion gets gibbed by a random fireball or crossbow bolt before they do their thing.

[deuterio12]

A note that I strongly disagree on this. Mystics are fairly meh in Dom5(They're significantly stronger in dom4, and ludicrously stronger in dom3), being strongly outperformed by mages like Guru for Astral, and most X2Y1 mages being flat better than them in my opinion, such as Witch Hunters, Caelian Seraphs, and the aforementioned Ulm Smiths.

Hmmm, fair enough in the mystics bit, weakened communions over each game edition don't do them any favors.

Still X2Y1 mages in five different flavors is ridiculously good, since even a single flavor can be the magic backbone of a nation like the Master Smith does for MA Ulm.


An additional note that relying on communions also has a serious time cost in combat, as your opponent starts throwing kill spells potentially immediately, so there's a greater chance with matrixing everyone up that some critical part of your communion gets gibbed by a random fireball or crossbow bolt before they do their thing.

By what insanity would you position your communion corps in crossbow/fireball range with no troops for bait/screening?

[Aeson]

By what insanity would you position your communion corps in crossbow/fireball range with no troops for bait/screening?
Bait doesn't always work. Even when it does, arrows, crossbows, and many spells aren't perfectly accurate; some spells are additionally deadly over large areas, e.g. Shimmering Fields, or a Shadow Blast cast by a particularly high-level death mage. Bad luck can be just as crippling to a Communion as poor screening.

[Manticoran]

Hmmm, fair enough in the mystics bit, weakened communions over each game edition don't do them any favors.

Still X2Y1 mages in five different flavors is ridiculously good, since even a single flavor can be the magic backbone of a nation like the Master Smith does for MA Ulm.



By what insanity would you position your communion corps in crossbow/fireball range with no troops for bait/screening?

First yeah, that's why I was recommending they be expensive and str at the x2y1 level. If your x2y1 mage is 250 gold or more, not sacred, and str, it's going to be hard to mass them to be combat mages. You'll use them for forging and rituals and some battlefield magic, but not like evocation spam unless you're desperate.

And yeah you wouldn't, but sometimes you have units with 4 precision throwing fireballs 6 squares or more off target, or fliers coming in and chewing through your guard units, or... Or... Basically you can do all the things that protect against it but it's still added risk compared to not having to cast communion.

[deuterio12]

First yeah, that's why I was recommending they be expensive and str at the x2y1 level. If your x2y1 mage is 250 gold or more, not sacred, and str, it's going to be hard to mass them to be combat mages. You'll use them for forging and rituals and some battlefield magic, but not like evocation spam unless you're desperate.

That sounds better, in particular since the nation should be about pokemon, not spamming cheap efficient humie mages. Those should be non-spammable.



Bait doesn't always work. Even when it does, arrows, crossbows, and many spells aren't perfectly accurate; some spells are additionally deadly over large areas, e.g. Shimmering Fields, or a Shadow Blast cast by a particularly high-level death mage. Bad luck can be just as crippling to a Communion as poor screening.




And yeah you wouldn't, but sometimes you have units with 4 precision throwing fireballs 6 squares or more off target, or fliers coming in and chewing through your guard units, or... Or... Basically you can do all the things that protect against it but it's still added risk compared to not having to cast communion.

And why would non-communion mages be any safer?

Bad luck and flier swarms will be just as deadly for a non-communion mage force.

If anything, it's easier to protect a communion because the slaves can go anywhere that there's less chance of them dying while masters can enjoy greater range whereas most non-communion mages need to go where their spells will make an impact which usually means closer to the action. Plus since slaves share master buffs, you can have a dedicated master buffing the crap out of the slaves until they're all regenerating ironmen with personal anti-arrow fields.

Sure the non-communion mages may get one non-buffed spell off before they get murdered by bad luck or an air force, but the impact will be so little compared to properly buffed mages that statistically it's worth the 1-2 rounds worth of buffing more often than not.

[Aeson]

And why would non-communion mages be any safer?

Bad luck and flier swarms will be just as deadly for a non-communion mage force.
Say I want to cast Fog Warriors. I need an A5 caster. How do I get that?
- A5 either natively* or with booster gems/items/empowerment/non-Communion spells.
- A4 Master with two Slaves
- A3 Master with four Slaves
- A2 Master with eight Slaves
- A1 Master with sixteen Slaves

(Note that I'm assuming that the casting mage is the level listed including any setup like booster items, combat pathboost spells, and gemboost.)

There is only one unit on the field whose death can prevent me from casting Fog Warriors if I'm using an A5 mage to cast it; there are seventeen units on the field, any one of whose deaths can prevent me from casting Fog Warriors when I cast Fog Warriors using an A1 master and sixteen slaves. Which is more likely? That a stray fireball hits my one of one A5 casters, or that a stray fireball hits one of sixteen Communion Slaves or the A1 master?

It's a lot easier to disrupt a big spell being cast by a Communion than it is to disrupt the same spell cast by a single powerful caster; the Communion is a lot harder to protect, and - especially in the extreme case - has an enormous opportunity cost in all those Communion Slaves who aren't really doing anything except boosting the masters and acting as fatigue sinks and all the stuff you may need to commit to protecting them. You can put more mages into the Communion to build in some redundancy and offset its vulnerability to some extent, of course, but that requires even more mages, and, well, it's not like you can't do that with the individual powerful caster, either, if you're willing to invest the gems or get lucky with your recruits. There's also that the less setup you need to do before casting the spell you really want, the less time there is for bad luck to strike and prevent you from doing it - if I have to spend three spells setting up to cast Fog Warriors (Communion Master => Storm => Summon Air Power => Fog Warriors), that's a lot more time in which a stray fireball could hit one of the members of the Communion than if all I have to do is have my A5 cast Fog Warriors on Round 1.

*It's possible to recruit such a mage, though I think that the best chance might be with EA Caelum, about 1 in 40 of whose Eagle Kings are natively A5. Fomoria (1 in 90 Fomorian Kings), Vanheim (1 in 160 Vanadrottir), Eriu (1 in 160 Tuatha), Tir'na'Nog (1 in 160 Tuatha Sorceresses), MA Caelum (1 in 160 High Seraphs), MA Ys (1 in 160 Morgen Sorceresses), and MA Phaecia (1 in 160 Prince Consorts) can theoretically manage it, as well. Might be some others I've missed that can do it, but probably not many.

[lord_khaine]

There's also that the less setup you need to do before casting the spell you really want, the less time there is for bad luck to strike and prevent you from doing it - if I have to spend three spells setting up to cast Fog Warriors (Communion Master => Storm => Summon Air Power => Fog Warriors), that's a lot more time in which a stray fireball could hit one of the members of the Communion than if all I have to do is have my A5 cast Fog Warriors on Round 1.

Thats a false comparison though, when one part have to add Storm and Summon air power.
And it could be turned around. Since Storm -> Air Power -> Fog Warriors are slower than Communion master -> Fog Warrior.

[deuterio12]

You can put more mages into the Communion to build in some redundancy and offset its vulnerability to some extent, of course, but that requires even more mages, and, well, it's not like you can't do that with the individual powerful caster, either, if you're willing to invest the gems or get lucky with your recruits.

Except that it's always possible to simply build more forts and labs for spamming extra communion slaves, whereas there's no reliable way to increase gem income and no way at all to increase recruitment rate of cap-only super mages.

If you luck out with an A5 mage, then sure it's superior to communion, but, well, only a few nations can do it and most will need some insane luck to pull it off to pull even one of said A5 mages, but a lot more nations can set up multiple fog warriors communions, and covering multiple armies to boot.

And as Lord Khaine pointed out, it's also faster going from big communion-»fog warrior than it is storm-»air power-»fog warriors.

With a crystal/slave matrix a communion can pull it turn 1, and it's actually competitive with building Air boosters if you have a base A3 mage (50 gems either way), actually cheaper with communion items if you have a dwarven hammer and also more versatile (since the slaves can still support other masters while a lone big air mage will spend the rest of the battle recovering from fatigue).

[tyckspoon]

Thats a false comparison though, when one part have to add Storm and Summon air power.
And it could be turned around. Since Storm -> Air Power -> Fog Warriors are slower than Communion master -> Fog Warrior.

If you're doing it via Communion, odds are you probably have a second caster handling the Storm part ('cause you probably have other casters you want using Storm Power or communioning up to toss out Thunder Strikes, if you're a heavy enough Air nation to have Fog Warriors as an expected part of your battle plans.) Or you had somebody make a Staff of Storms to save that turn and casting fatigue cost all together.

[lord_khaine]

It was already an extremely abstract example.
So i sought to keep it as direct as possible when comparing those two things.
Of course, in a lot of cases its not a problem if it takes a few turns before Fog Warriors are up.
Especially if your doing elemental summoning.

[deuterio12]

So I had done a couple mods before but never an actual new nation so decided to give it a try and here is the initial result EA Pewter City, Rock and Roll! pokemon mod with each big city being its ow nation (http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=93655452533162671325) (Pewter, Cerulean, Vermillion and Celadon Cities done so far).


https://i.imgsafe.org/3a/3a62a04f62.png
https://i.imgsafe.org/f9/f9d6809b43.png
https://i.imgsafe.org/f9/f9d6ce82ef.png
https://i.imgsafe.org/f9/f9d6d1c0f8.png
https://i.imgsafe.org/f9/f9d67edf1a.png


Probably sprites need some rescaling and the stats/costs most certainly will need polishing, no heroes or national spells yet but hey it's still a working rooster of units and commanders!

Shiny pokemon are the spellcaster versions. Human trainers auto summon a pokemon at the start of each battle.

If anybody has suggestions/critiques I'm all ears.

EDIT: Added new version fixing some bugs, tweaking stuff around like giving a penalty to rituals and crafting for the pokemon casters, non-amphibious ones get cold vulnerability and cold blooded, increased costs for pokemon troops and changed paths around.

EDIT2: Added version 0.15

[deuterio12]

New Pewter City version (https://www.mediafire.com/file/7wi22eencw8ts03/pcity013.rar/file), tweaked stats and costs all around plus added custom gods, heroes and national spells.

[Manticoran]

New Pewter City version (https://www.mediafire.com/file/7wi22eencw8ts03/pcity013.rar/file), tweaked stats and costs all around plus added custom gods, heroes and national spells.

Wow, that's really awesome! Want help with balancing? It looks like a pretty solid concept.

[lord_khaine]

That looks awesome!
I really like the idea of having trainers auto summon pokemon at the start of battle.
That mechanic could likely be exploited further in some way?

[deuterio12]

Newer version (https://www.mediafire.com/file/b7maic5irvrpfn4/Pcity014.rar/file), mostly just unlocking the ability to actually build forts underwater which I had completely forgot. :smallredface:


Wow, that's really awesome! Want help with balancing? It looks like a pretty solid concept.

Thanks! :smallbiggrin:

And yes certainly could use help with balancing, in particular tweaking gold costs and whatnot.


That looks awesome!
I really like the idea of having trainers auto summon pokemon at the start of battle.

Yeah it just feels natural and makes sure a trainer has always at least one pokemon by their side.



That mechanic could likely be exploited further in some way?

I tried adding multiple autosummons to a single trainer but seems like only the last one works.

Although something that may work is a bunch of pokeball national items that auto summon fancier mons at the start of battle, still figuring out how to do items though.

[tyckspoon]

I tried adding multiple autosummons to a single trainer but seems like only the last one works.

Although something that may work is a bunch of pokeball national items that auto summon fancier mons at the start of battle, still figuring out how to do items though.

There are some Pretender chassis that have autosummons/retinues of multiple varieties of creature (Annunaki of Growth and Rebirth is one.) Looking at the existing data files for those might give some idea how to make scripting for multiple autosummons work.

I'll probably download it and poke at it a bit, can't give much opinion on possible balance until then.

[Manticoran]

There are some Pretender chassis that have autosummons/retinues of multiple varieties of creature (Annunaki of Growth and Rebirth is one.) Looking at the existing data files for those might give some idea how to make scripting for multiple autosummons work.

I'll probably download it and poke at it a bit, can't give much opinion on possible balance until then.

It's actually pretty straightforward. You just have the retinue command on multiple lines.

[deuterio12]

It seems to be a bit more complicated than that.

Basic retinue command is #batstartsum1 (ID), which summons 1 monster, but if I put that multiple times only last one applies.

However if I use #batstartsum2 or #batstartsum3 or #batstartsumX they seem to stack, thing is those summon 1/2/3/x monsters each instead of just 1 of each kind.

So seems like for multiple retinues each monster type needs to come in a different amount.

Or does anybody knows of a monster that has a retinue of different monsters but only 1 of each kind?

[tyckspoon]

Hmm. No, actually, all the examples that come to mind either have fixed numbers of a single type of retinue critter, or there's one Pretender chassis that has like 1d6 wolves 2d6 deer and 3d6 ..sheep or something. If the game thinks every battle start summon with the same numerical argument is the same command/overwrites the other ones that would explain that.. Might be able to hack around it by having them do an auto-cast spell that summons the appropriate critter instead, although then you're looking at adding a custom spell as well. (..mind, that might be something you want to do anyways, because then you'll also have a working in-battle summon spell your trainers can use.)

[deuterio12]

I actually had considered a line of "I choose you X!" for in-battle summons but couple problems with that:
-The pokemon themselves would also be able to use them, although there seems to be some ways to restrict that like #onlymnr and #reqtaskmaster (give taskmaster to all trainers?)
-Even if I add a limitation, it would mean trainer can call dozens of pokemon in a single battle when they're only supposed to carry 6 around tops. Or would people be fine with a bunch of trainers potentially flooding the field with pokemon?

Either way making such spells and making them autocast at battle start is something I hadn't considered and definitely sounds worth pursuing.

[tyckspoon]

Downloaded it, haven't played yet. First glance:

The nation has literally no use for Resources. Sloth 3/Order 3 seems like a no brainer in scales, because while there is no downside to tanking scales you're going to need Recruitment points quite badly (especially as an Early Age nation where lower province populations means Recruit points are harder to come by.) Maybe rebalance those costs a little, maybe make at least one attractive unit a heavier cost in Resources so this is less obviously the choice to make.

It's going to expand super easily - the combination of high prot and weapon resistances on literally all your troops means they're just going to roll straight through pretty much every indy province, even if you all you do is swarm Geodude - they're like Markata that don't suck >.> They're even not amazingly vulnerable to getting evocation'd off the field, because you gave them really good resist to the main blasting elements and only a weakness to Cold, which is usually easily mitigated by Protection (they will be very vulnerable to the battlefield cold enchant and Chill auras, tho.) I'd probably step down the resists, at least on the recruit anywheres/non-reclimit troops.

Onyx seem like they should have an area attack, either actually give them Trample or make Slam Area 1 (maybe make their Rock Throw hit an area?) They look like they're probably worth the money as is, it would just be fitting for their size and description.

You've been overgenerous with siege bonus; I can see where it's coming from in theme, but having your basic recruit troop be worth ~4 standard humans makes them way too good at cracking down walls, especially for as easy as they are to mass up.

Hikers being assassins is just hilarious to me. Having a Rhydon as their pet summon/assassination tool might be a bit too good, will need to play with them and see what the success rate is. Against non-mage enemies, at least, I expect they'll be near 100%, with the unusual distinction of being able to pretty reliable kill Heavy Cavalry and Barbarian commanders. (High prot, resistance to the most common weapon types, enough HP to soak up two or three hits most of the time, Berserk, and trample/multiple attacks? Yeah, not betting on poor indy Commanders.)

Most of the commanders seem reasonable at first glance.

Your custom Pretender chassis are too cheap - the rainbow ones have more base paths than any other rainbow chassis, which alone would make up for costing a few extra points, but you also have them with a potent auto-summoned bodyguard and domsummon for a few free extra troops. The Legendary Kabuto and Omastar in particular are super attractive for dormant or imprisoned scales-centric choices, because you really just want to spend as few points as possible on your Pretender's body for those. (Dormant Legendary Kabutops: Dom 7 Order 3 Sloth 3 neutral temp Growth 0 Luck 0 Magic 1, W10 Quickness bless. Or Imprisoned full scales: Dom 10 Order 3 Sloth 3 Hot 0 Growth 3 Luck 3 Magic 3, W1 E 5. Reinvig and Strength as blesses; nothing major, going troop focus here, but they'll be useful traits anyway.) ..Giant Boulder Badge is pretty much a standard immobile, nothing much to say there.

It does amuse me that such a heavy Earth nation doesn't really get much benefit from the classic Earth buffs. No normal armor on the troops means nothing for Legions of Steel to improve, and they all already have high natural protection so there isn't anywhere near the drastic improvement from Ironskin/Stoneskinning them. Probably looking more at throwing a bunch of Earthquakes (your dudes don't care, see again really high natural Prot) and using Earth Meld/Maws of the Earth to pin enemies down so your average-at-best attack skill GeoSwarms can smash them down. Hmm.. gem-heavy approach, but throwing down an Iron Bane and then a couple of Earthquakes or just chunking out a bunch of Blade Wind would probably wreck things pretty badly, and you've got easy access to high-end Earth..

Not very useful crosspaths to go with all that big Earth, although you do get pretty easy access to Rust Mist. I guess armor destruction is going to be their big combat trademark.

Edit: Going to try that imprisoned scales build first here and see if the Geodudes expand as easily as I think they will.

Edit: They're pretty good, although very slow. Mixing in an Onyx or a few Rhydon for big bruiser bodies is helpful. In fact a Hiker or two leading Geodudes actually make very efficient expansion groups - the Geodudes do quite well at dealing with the front line chaff, and the Rhydons are.. well, they're berserking trampling superfast heavy cavalry.

Need to down-size the flag emblem a bit, that badge is huge and makes it hard to see anything else on the province.

Edit Edit Edit: You have no Fort PD type assigned. This is.. problematic - the Forts are currently defended only by a Geodude commander.
EEEDit: And they can't build underwater forts, although I won't guarantee I got the most updated file - this is something you said you already fixed... oh. Yeah, I was using the pc13 file.

[deuterio12]

Downloaded it, haven't played yet. First glance:

The nation has literally no use for Resources. Sloth 3/Order 3 seems like a no brainer in scales, because while there is no downside to tanking scales you're going to need Recruitment points quite badly (especially as an Early Age nation where lower province populations means Recruit points are harder to come by.) Maybe rebalance those costs a little, maybe make at least one attractive unit a heavier cost in Resources so this is less obviously the choice to make.

Several nations have low/no armor units and love sloth.

If anything, recruitment points were added in Dominions 5 precisely as a balancing point for that. Resources are explicitly meant to be manufactred gear, so "naked" units should be balanced by high recruitment points costs.

Plus in dominions 5 Sloth scales also greatly affect gold (more than Order now) so it's not a completely painless hit.



It's going to expand super easily - the combination of high prot and weapon resistances on literally all your troops means they're just going to roll straight through pretty much every indy province, even if you all you do is swarm Geodude - they're like Markata that don't suck >.> They're even not amazingly vulnerable to getting evocation'd off the field, because you gave them really good resist to the main blasting elements and only a weakness to Cold, which is usually easily mitigated by Protection (they will be very vulnerable to the battlefield cold enchant and Chill auras, tho.) I'd probably step down the resists, at least on the recruit anywheres/non-reclimit troops.

Note that unlike most stony beings in dominion, the rock pokemon have no resistance to poison at all so that's another weakness of theirs that can be exploited, plus only average morale and MR for troops that cost above average so fear effects will make a dent too (they'll also rout relatively faster once something can hurt them).



Onyx seem like they should have an area attack, either actually give them Trample or make Slam Area 1 (maybe make their Rock Throw hit an area?) They look like they're probably worth the money as is, it would just be fitting for their size and description.

Snake-like beings usually don't have trample so made Slam #aoe 1. I would rather keep the moves standardized so made a new Rockslide attack with area 1.




You've been overgenerous with siege bonus; I can see where it's coming from in theme, but having your basic recruit troop be worth ~4 standard humans makes them way too good at cracking down walls, especially for as easy as they are to mass up.

Fair enough, reduced siege bonus accross the board.



Hikers being assassins is just hilarious to me. Having a Rhydon as their pet summon/assassination tool might be a bit too good, will need to play with them and see what the success rate is. Against non-mage enemies, at least, I expect they'll be near 100%, with the unusual distinction of being able to pretty reliable kill Heavy Cavalry and Barbarian commanders. (High prot, resistance to the most common weapon types, enough HP to soak up two or three hits most of the time, Berserk, and trample/multiple attacks? Yeah, not betting on poor indy Commanders.)

Will the fabled assassin expansion finally become viable?:smallbiggrin:



Most of the commanders seem reasonable at first glance.

Your custom Pretender chassis are too cheap - the rainbow ones have more base paths than any other rainbow chassis, which alone would make up for costing a few extra points, but you also have them with a potent auto-summoned bodyguard and domsummon for a few free extra troops. The Legendary Kabuto and Omastar in particular are super attractive for dormant or imprisoned scales-centric choices, because you really just want to spend as few points as possible on your Pretender's body for those. (Dormant Legendary Kabutops: Dom 7 Order 3 Sloth 3 neutral temp Growth 0 Luck 0 Magic 1, W10 Quickness bless. Or Imprisoned full scales: Dom 10 Order 3 Sloth 3 Hot 0 Growth 3 Luck 3 Magic 3, W1 E 5. Reinvig and Strength as blesses; nothing major, going troop focus here, but they'll be useful traits anyway.) ..Giant Boulder Badge is pretty much a standard immobile, nothing much to say there.

Will reduce the discount to 20 points then.



It does amuse me that such a heavy Earth nation doesn't really get much benefit from the classic Earth buffs. No normal armor on the troops means nothing for Legions of Steel to improve, and they all already have high natural protection so there isn't anywhere near the drastic improvement from Ironskin/Stoneskinning them.

That's like complaining that Abyssia has no use for all the fire protection spells in fire or that Niefelheim isn't interested in cold protection spells from water or that Caelum has little use for mass flight. It just means the mages don't need to spend as much time buffing their troops! .:smalltongue:



Probably looking more at throwing a bunch of Earthquakes (your dudes don't care, see again really high natural Prot) and using Earth Meld/Maws of the Earth to pin enemies down so your average-at-best attack skill GeoSwarms can smash them down. Hmm.. gem-heavy approach, but throwing down an Iron Bane and then a couple of Earthquakes or just chunking out a bunch of Blade Wind would probably wreck things pretty badly, and you've got easy access to high-end Earth..

Mind you the pokemon champion leaders can't lead troops besides the Omastar Champion that you can only get underwater, so the human trainers still need to protect themselves against earthquakes.



Not very useful crosspaths to go with all that big Earth, although you do get pretty easy access to Rust Mist. I guess armor destruction is going to be their big combat trademark.


Edit: Going to try that imprisoned scales build first here and see if the Geodudes expand as easily as I think they will.

Edit: They're pretty good, although very slow. Mixing in an Onyx or a few Rhydon for big bruiser bodies is helpful. In fact a Hiker or two leading Geodudes actually make very efficient expansion groups - the Geodudes do quite well at dealing with the front line chaff, and the Rhydons are.. well, they're berserking trampling superfast heavy cavalry.

Well they're supposed to be rock hard rhynos. Make them slower perhaps? More expensive? Both?



Need to down-size the flag emblem a bit, that badge is huge and makes it hard to see anything else on the province.

Done.



Edit Edit Edit: You have no Fort PD type assigned. This is.. problematic - the Forts are currently defended only by a Geodude commander.
EEEDit: And they can't build underwater forts, although I won't guarantee I got the most updated file - this is something you said you already fixed... oh. Yeah, I was using the pc13 file.

Yeah UW fort was only fixed for version 0.14, and the PD should've been properly coded in that version too. Thanks for the playtest!

[lord_khaine]

Will the fabled assassin expansion finally become viable?

I got that working moderatly well for Patalla.
I were testing a regeneration/invulnerability bless.

And it turns out that Nagini can indeed wreck just about every indie commander you encounter.
Even Heavy Cavalry a lot of the time.

[deuterio12]

Yeah, it's not like dominions has lack of uber units.

Version 0.15 of Pewter City out (https://www.mediafire.com/file/785oo2d412l8fd9/Pcity015.rar/file), tweaks as in the last post, battle spells for summoning pokemon, all trainers are now taskmasters (not that you can recruit slaves, but the battle spells only work for taskmasters), also PD should be properly fixed now.

[tyckspoon]

Several nations have low/no armor units and love sloth.

If anything, recruitment points were added in Dominions 5 precisely as a balancing point for that. Resources are explicitly meant to be manufactred gear, so "naked" units should be balanced by high recruitment points costs.

Plus in dominions 5 Sloth scales also greatly affect gold (more than Order now) so it's not a completely painless hit.


Order/Turmoil and Sloth/Productivity actually have the same impact on base income; it's trading Resources for Recruitment points (and reduced event chances. If you're going Order 3 by default I suppose I could probably justify Misfortune 1 in here as well, will take a look at that if trying an Awake Pretender..)

Oh, speaking of scales, with all the cold-blooded creatures a mild preference for Heat might be suitable?



Will the fabled assassin expansion finally become viable?:smallbiggrin:

Works pretty well, just not likely to be your only means of expansion. When I play assassin nations I'll usually have an assassin expansion group going, because it lets you build another way of expanding that uses mostly different resources to hiring troop squads.


Well they're supposed to be rock hard rhynos. Make them slower perhaps? More expensive? Both?

Reduced combat speed, I think, at least, so they aren't Trampling over 2 squares/round and take a little more time to get to the enemy. The default man-on-horse heavy cavalry speed is 20, maybe put the Rhyhorns to like 18? (Twenty would be ok, just thinking about the interaction with Trample.)


Edit: Legendary Onyx awake expander. Earth 6, Hard Skin bless. Prot 36 in combat (Earth magic bonus effect, +5 Hard Skin, +1 Berserking.) Could use Recuperation or Regen, but adding that many extra paths to him would be too expensive.. fortunately I have Healer priests.

Edit 2: A squad of Hikers just Rhyhorn-ambushed their way through a Throne; Nature-Death-Air defenders, including two mages that tried to defend themselves with Swarm and Raise Skeletons. Rhyhorn don't care, only damage was an affliction on one of the Hikers because I forgot to set them to Hold so they were just walking up behind the Rhyhorn. Fight 400-odd enemies including manikins and phantasms? nah bro, assassinate. Hikers probably too cheap for what they do - you have them priced more like basic scouts. Assassination capacity should make them more expensive, even if the particular assassination wasn't super effective. Only real threat I can see currently is if they try to ambush something like a strong Astral or Air mage and the Hiker winds up eating a Mind Burn or Lightning Bolt, or you run into a really heavy thug/SuperCombatant chassis.. but those are mostly immune to anything other than really specialized, geared mage assassinations anyway.

Edit 3: Using Rhyhorns in combat parties this time around, just had a few survive through/kill enough to evolve. You.. probably should slow down Rhydons. Combat Speed 32 is just kind of ludicrous, they can cover the field nearly as fast as flyers.

[Manticoran]

Edit 3: Using Rhyhorns in combat parties this time around, just had a few survive through/kill enough to evolve. You.. probably should slow down Rhydons. Combat Speed 32 is just kind of ludicrous, they can cover the field nearly as fast as flyers.

I'd recommend something like 10-12 personally. Using riding the Rhyhorn in X/Y as an example, it was not any faster than normal people, perhaps slower.

[deuterio12]

Order/Turmoil and Sloth/Productivity actually have the same impact on base income; it's trading Resources for Recruitment points (and reduced event chances. If you're going Order 3 by default I suppose I could probably justify Misfortune 1 in here as well, will take a look at that if trying an Awake Pretender..)

Oh, speaking of scales, with all the cold-blooded creatures a mild preference for Heat might be suitable?

Well there is already a precedence in EA/MA Agartha that has a lot of cold-blooded stuff but standard neutral scales and Pewter City doesn't seem any particularly hot/cold climate.

In the other hand making them default heat 1 or 2 would mean less dupability

Will think about it.




Reduced combat speed, I think, at least, so they aren't Trampling over 2 squares/round and take a little more time to get to the enemy. The default man-on-horse heavy cavalry speed is 20, maybe put the Rhyhorns to like 18? (Twenty would be ok, just thinking about the interaction with Trample.)

I'll gow with 19 for now then.



Edit: Legendary Onyx awake expander. Earth 6, Hard Skin bless. Prot 36 in combat (Earth magic bonus effect, +5 Hard Skin, +1 Berserking.) Could use Recuperation or Regen, but adding that many extra paths to him would be too expensive.. fortunately I have Healer priests.

So an Earth snake?
-L. Onyx has a bit better protection but worst HP.
-L. Onyx has stealth but no amphibious (which hurts more due to being unable to cross rivers which will never freeze if you take heat scales).
-L. Onyx has electricity and fire resistance but no poison resistance plus cold vulnerability.
-Earth Snake has innate recuperation while L. Onyx would need to spend extra gold buying a nurse and eiher have her tag along (and risk being taken out) or go back to base when they get an affliction.
-Berseker is a two-edged sword since it does make the L.Onyx tougher but also unable to retreat if it does run into something that can hurt it plus makes it harder to be a spellcaster late game.




Edit 2: A squad of Hikers just Rhyhorn-ambushed their way through a Throne; Nature-Death-Air defenders, including two mages that tried to defend themselves with Swarm and Raise Skeletons. Rhyhorn don't care, only damage was an affliction on one of the Hikers because I forgot to set them to Hold so they were just walking up behind the Rhyhorn. Fight 400-odd enemies including manikins and phantasms? nah bro, assassinate. Hikers probably too cheap for what they do - you have them priced more like basic scouts. Assassination capacity should make them more expensive, even if the particular assassination wasn't super effective. Only real threat I can see currently is if they try to ambush something like a strong Astral or Air mage and the Hiker winds up eating a Mind Burn or Lightning Bolt, or you run into a really heavy thug/SuperCombatant chassis.. but those are mostly immune to anything other than really specialized, geared mage assassinations anyway.

Hmm, I'm using autocalc but I guess the game really understimates the auto summon ability. So how much gold would be appropriate? 100? 150?



Edit 3: Using Rhyhorns in combat parties this time around, just had a few survive through/kill enough to evolve. You.. probably should slow down Rhydons. Combat Speed 32 is just kind of ludicrous, they can cover the field nearly as fast as flyers.
Will lower to 20.


I'd recommend something like 10-12 personally. Using riding the Rhyhorn in X/Y as an example, it was not any faster than normal people, perhaps slower.

I see that just as a game limitation. In particular since in the anime, they're seen to be relatively fast, there was even at least one episode dedicated to rhyhorn racing (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI4OEeFso5I) (sorry for not finding a better clip, but still shows rhyhorns can go fast, just not as easy to control, in particular by inexperienced kids).

Hmmmm, Rhyhorn knights as heavy resource unit?

Also laying down the basics for Cerulean city, damn there's a lot of water pokemon.

-Coastal nation.
-Water magic plus air (ice=water+air in dominions usually), some astral (psychic), nature (poison).
-Water pokemon get resistance to cold and fire, vulnerability to shock.
-Will use the cave crab as guideline for krabby/kingler stats and kappa for squirtle/wartotle/blastoise stats.
-Even fish stuff like goldeen are amphibious but get a super slow land form.
-Psyducks and slowpokes and evolutions get mind blasting.
-Champions/legendaries tentacruel (water/nature), Starmie (water/astral), Blastoise (solid water), Gyarados (water/air)

Human Commanders (everybody gets sailing):
-Swimmer man (coast)
-Swimmer woman (coast)
-Sailor (non-mage great commander, coast)
-Fisherman (non-mage commander, inland)
-maid scout assassin (inland) because Misty had an army of maids in the adventures manga which always amused me.
-plus the jr and cooltrainers with different paths and recolored.

[tyckspoon]

So an Earth snake?
-L. Onyx has a bit better protection but worst HP.
-L. Onyx has stealth but no amphibious (which hurts more due to being unable to cross rivers which will never freeze if you take heat scales).
-L. Onyx has electricity and fire resistance but no poison resistance plus cold vulnerability.
-Earth Snake has innate recuperation while L. Onyx would need to spend extra gold buying a nurse and eiher have her tag along (and risk being taken out) or go back to base when they get an affliction.
-Berseker is a two-edged sword since it does make the L.Onyx tougher but also unable to retreat if it does run into something that can hurt it plus makes it harder to be a spellcaster late game.

Basically, yeah. Didn't mean to imply it was overpowered - I think it's about right for an expander monster. And honestly that much Protection combined with high base HP and Dominion bonus means it is pretty much never going to suffer a big enough hit to really risk getting afflicted anyways (I did buy it another Onyx as a buddy as part of my first turn recruitment to help spread out enemies a bit and make certain it couldn't get swarmed too bad.) Fear and the AoE Slam attack are other advantages it has on Erf Snek, because it means it's a lot more capable of dealing with being outnumbered and won't get chipped to death anywhere near as easily as Earth Snake while the Snake slowly chews through things one body at a time.


Hmm, I'm using autocalc but I guess the game really understimates the auto summon ability. So how much gold would be appropriate? 100? 150?

They're basically delivery mechanisms for Rhyhorn-assassins, so.. make a stealthy Assassin Rhyhorn commander, let the game autocalc that, and use that for a basis? As is they're same cost as the Rhyhorn themselves, which is definitely too cheap - it's kind of like buying a Rhyhorn, only it comes with some modest command ability and the power to make assassination attacks.


Also laying down the basics for Cerulean city, damn there's a lot of water pokemon.

Don't forget to keep track of your used unit/spell ID numbers - if you want your PokeNations to play nice with each other you'll need to make sure you don't duplicate ID tags.

Things Hikers have so far failed to kill: An independent province with Shades, whose commander was ethereal, had an armor-negating weapon, and magic, plus a dark fiend bodyguard. A fire mage who happened to have a couple of gems, which let him put out a lesser fire elemental before the Rhyhorn got to him - too big to trample and Rhyhorn doesn't have a way to hit Ethereal. (Would have won this, eventually, but the second fire elemental plus point-blank casting support from the mage chipped through the fire resistance. The second Hiker got him easily after I'd burnt his gems.) Abyssia's Warmaster prophet.

[deuterio12]

Basically, yeah. Didn't mean to imply it was overpowered - I think it's about right for an expander monster. And honestly that much Protection combined with high base HP and Dominion bonus means it is pretty much never going to suffer a big enough hit to really risk getting afflicted anyways (I did buy it another Onyx as a buddy as part of my first turn recruitment to help spread out enemies a bit and make certain it couldn't get swarmed too bad.) Fear and the AoE Slam attack are other advantages it has on Erf Snek, because it means it's a lot more capable of dealing with being outnumbered and won't get chipped to death anywhere near as easily as Earth Snake while the Snake slowly chews through things one body at a time.

Earth Snake has fear too, that's indeed pretty good for expanding even if biting one thing at a time. And the earth snake's bite has actually a pretty good attack bonus so it's reliably hitting even if it's just 1 attack/round. plus super poison so it can chew other big monsters if push comes to shove.



They're basically delivery mechanisms for Rhyhorn-assassins, so.. make a stealthy Assassin Rhyhorn commander, let the game autocalc that, and use that for a basis? As is they're same cost as the Rhyhorn themselves, which is definitely too cheap - it's kind of like buying a Rhyhorn, only it comes with some modest command ability and the power to make assassination attacks.

Tried that out, and game calculated that a berseker trampling assassin is 60 gold, not too shabby. Tacking that on top of the hiker base cost is 110 gold which sounds fairer.



Don't forget to keep track of your used unit/spell ID numbers - if you want your PokeNations to play nice with each other you'll need to make sure you don't duplicate ID tags.

Of course, already doing so, but thanks for the reminder anyway.



Things Hikers have so far failed to kill: An independent province with Shades, whose commander was ethereal, had an armor-negating weapon, and magic, plus a dark fiend bodyguard. A fire mage who happened to have a couple of gems, which let him put out a lesser fire elemental before the Rhyhorn got to him - too big to trample and Rhyhorn doesn't have a way to hit Ethereal. (Would have won this, eventually, but the second fire elemental plus point-blank casting support from the mage chipped through the fire resistance. The second Hiker got him easily after I'd burnt his gems.) Abyssia's Warmaster prophet.

Not surprised that fire works if you just apply enough of it.

Hmm, so seems like big targets aren't as vulnerable. Haven't you run into any titans guarding thrones per chance? Giant nations? How about other size 3 commanders?


https://i.imgsafe.org/1f/1feb53d59d.png
Still seems not that worth it over basic rhyhorns. Make them sacred? Cap only then?Some other nifty ability?

Faster movement representing the rider spuring them in battle or plain superior training/bonding?

Maybe remove their resistances/vulnerabilities both ways or just the cold vulnerability so Pewter City has one non-sacred unit to invade cold places?

Suggestions?

[tyckspoon]

Hmm, so seems like big targets aren't as vulnerable. Haven't you run into any titans guarding thrones per chance? Giant nations? How about other size 3 commanders?


I just finished wrecking a Hinnom; they go through the mages pretty easily, and I think they even bagged a Baal (although that one might have just been rushed down by five or so rockrhinos in a field battle instead.) Melqarts give no craps, which is probably predictable, and I think Avvite Commanders would be something of a tossup - the key factor, I think, is actually Defense skill (or some similar protective ability to make attacks miss - I already mentioned a problem trying to cut through Ethereal, and things with Awe would also be a pretty big roadbump.) If they can't trample than the Rhyhorn is relying on standard attacks, and they have only average attack skill to do it with, so a decent thug or supercombatant chassis can dodge them long enough to have a shot at winning. I would predict similar results for other nations - mages with little to no Prot or Defense can get beat down by two high-strength attacks, while the actual fighters can at least make it a fight. The Elfpony nations probably just don't even care - cavalry size makes them untrampleable, and between glamour and the Defense bonus for being mounted they'd have to be very unlucky to lose to a Rhyhorn. It might take them quite a few rounds to actually bring one down, but I think they'd get there.




https://i.imgsafe.org/1f/1feb53d59d.png
Still seems not that worth it over basic rhyhorns. Make them sacred? Cap only then?Some other nifty ability?

Faster movement representing the rider spuring them in battle or plain superior training/bonding?

Maybe remove their resistances/vulnerabilities both ways or just the cold vulnerability so Pewter City has one non-sacred unit to invade cold places?

Suggestions?


Well, there's some benefit just in being a relatively normal troop type that can be hit with the standard Earth buffs, but maybe give them an elite level Attack skill (13 or 14?) That would give them a bit of a niche in countering the kinds of troops Rhyhorns and Geodudes can't really hit effectively thanks to their lower Attack rating. PokeKnights tilting at giants.

[lord_khaine]

Earth Snake has fear too, that's indeed pretty good for expanding even if biting one thing at a time. And the earth snake's bite has actually a pretty good attack bonus so it's reliably hitting even if it's just 1 attack/round. plus super poison so it can chew other big monsters if push comes to shove.

I would say that the Earth Serpent is not just pretty good.
Its extremely good at chewing though just about anything that get in its way.
I tested it extentively as preperation for my last game. With Earth 4-6 it crushes just about anything besides cavemen provinces.
Even outside of its dominion.


Tried that out, and game calculated that a berseker trampling assassin is 60 gold, not too shabby. Tacking that on top of the hiker base cost is 110 gold which sounds fairer.

It still sounds a little cheap for whats basically a scout with a bottle of living water as far as i can hear?
In part i guess, because 2 of them already forms a slow but effective expansion force on their own.

Or well, if they cost 2 recruitment points. Then 2 Jomon Ninja might almost measure up to the value you get from them.

[Thrantar]

The lack of poison resistance may not be as large of a drawback as expected.
Many sources of poison damage trigger on damage, so once you start getting to the 15+ prot area, lots of poisoned weapons fail to get the required scratch off.
Most poison spells will still work fine, as will poison auras.
Not sure about the poison barbs on some Atlantean and Xilbalban stuff.

Be careful with autocalc.
Where you set the chassis cost matters.

[lord_khaine]

I believe the poison barbs are AN but reduced by reach.
At least i have seen mentioned as a counter to different sorts of cavalry due to the 0 reach hoof attacks.

[deuterio12]

New version of pokemon mod (https://www.mediafire.com/file/rkbj6bpdvmhyzs7/pokemon021.rar/file), now with Cerulean city added!


https://i.imgsafe.org/3a/3a62a04f62.png



That was quite a bit of work, but hopefully the other nations should be easier since they have less pokemon (water's like 1/5 of all pokemon even in the first game) and also I get to use custom effects again.


I just finished wrecking a Hinnom; they go through the mages pretty easily, and I think they even bagged a Baal (although that one might have just been rushed down by five or so rockrhinos in a field battle instead.) Melqarts give no craps, which is probably predictable, and I think Avvite Commanders would be something of a tossup - the key factor, I think, is actually Defense skill (or some similar protective ability to make attacks miss - I already mentioned a problem trying to cut through Ethereal, and things with Awe would also be a pretty big roadbump.) If they can't trample than the Rhyhorn is relying on standard attacks, and they have only average attack skill to do it with, so a decent thug or supercombatant chassis can dodge them long enough to have a shot at winning. I would predict similar results for other nations - mages with little to no Prot or Defense can get beat down by two high-strength attacks, while the actual fighters can at least make it a fight. The Elfpony nations probably just don't even care - cavalry size makes them untrampleable, and between glamour and the Defense bonus for being mounted they'd have to be very unlucky to lose to a Rhyhorn. It might take them quite a few rounds to actually bring one down, but I think they'd get there.


That sounds good to me, they're good but can't deal with everything.

So gave them a big bump in the gold price tag.



Well, there's some benefit just in being a relatively normal troop type that can be hit with the standard Earth buffs, but maybe give them an elite level Attack skill (13 or 14?) That would give them a bit of a niche in countering the kinds of troops Rhyhorns and Geodudes can't really hit effectively thanks to their lower Attack rating. PokeKnights tilting at giants.

Good idea in extra attack skill, done.


I would say that the Earth Serpent is not just pretty good.
Its extremely good at chewing though just about anything that get in its way.
I tested it extentively as preperation for my last game. With Earth 4-6 it crushes just about anything besides cavemen provinces.
Even outside of its dominion.

It used to be better, like when it costed only 130 points. But now it's basically eating up all your scales.



It still sounds a little cheap for whats basically a scout with a bottle of living water as far as i can hear?
In part i guess, because 2 of them already forms a slow but effective expansion force on their own.

Or well, if they cost 2 recruitment points. Then 2 Jomon Ninja might almost measure up to the value you get from them.

A bottle of living water would be plain stronger, bigger size and hits harder.
And the thing with expansion is that slow is not that effective. Speed is key in cleaning indies, and no matter how good an assassin is they'll always need two turns to take a province and that's with needing an extra commander to actually bump the province, while somebody expanding with plain good troops will literally expand twice as fast. Plus an expansion party of troops will remain relevant for an actual war against another player, while assassins can't assassinate PD and players can take measures to counter them.

So for now just increased the gold cost, because if they start costing as much recruitment points as a mage then it's really hard to argue it's worth it to significantly slow down inboth your expansion and your research/mage numbers just for a fancy assassin.


The lack of poison resistance may not be as large of a drawback as expected.
Many sources of poison damage trigger on damage, so once you start getting to the 15+ prot area, lots of poisoned weapons fail to get the required scratch off.
Most poison spells will still work fine, as will poison auras.
Not sure about the poison barbs on some Atlantean and Xilbalban stuff.

As lord khaine pointed out, poison barbs only care about weapon reach and thus are kinda of a surprise counter against elite infantry who'll kill themselves with their hooves regardless of their armor and defense skill.



Be careful with autocalc.
Where you set the chassis cost matters.

Wait, what? Could you explain that in more detail please?

[lord_khaine]

It used to be better, like when it costed only 130 points. But now it's basically eating up all your scales.

Ahh.. its not entirely that bad.
You can still get E4, D4, and +3 scales.
That will still crush just about anything else than barbarians and large numbers of heavy cavalry.


A bottle of living water would be plain stronger, bigger size and hits harder.
And the thing with expansion is that slow is not that effective. Speed is key in cleaning indies, and no matter how good an assassin is they'll always need two turns to take a province and that's with needing an extra commander to actually bump the province, while somebody expanding with plain good troops will literally expand twice as fast. Plus an expansion party of troops will remain relevant for an actual war against another player, while assassins can't assassinate PD and players can take measures to counter them.

But the moment you can reliably kill a mounted commander, how much of the rest would then be overkill?
Its for that matter not that slow again. Yes it takes a little longer than the regular army. But you can for a start use a scout to bump the province.
And the trick is to send a regular army the opposite way.

Also, its perfect if they begin wasting time and efford on guarding all their mages and commanders.
That takes both time and resources.

[deuterio12]

But the moment you can reliably kill a mounted commander, how much of the rest would then be overkill?
Its for that matter not that slow again. Yes it takes a little longer than the regular army. But you can for a start use a scout to bump the province.
And the trick is to send a regular army the opposite way.

Scouts cost precious commander points from your forts until you luck out in an indie scout province (and the pokemon nations don't have cheap normal scouts for recruitment, they start at hiker/maid).

And it's still half as slow as a solid expansion party because the assassin always needs to spend one turn moving then one turn doing the actual assassination. And if the province has more than one commander (sometimes they may have half a dozen), then that can reall be a bump.



Also, its perfect if they begin wasting time and efford on guarding all their mages and commanders.
That takes both time and resources.

Minimal time and resources that can then be changed somewhere else if you play smart. Like in our first game here Abyssia tried to rely on assassins to cover their forts, but I was one step ahead and had 5 heavy infantry attached to every each of my commanders to stop that ahead of time. That was just +50 gold and zero commander recruitment investment per field commander, and the troops were still helping break down the fort's walls and could be assigned to other duties. That's for field commanders moving out mind you, forts can and should have a general patrol force instead to rout out basic enemy scouts if nothing else. Information is power, and negating information to your opponent is taking their power.

Another nice trick is when I'm playing a non-blood nation and get blood slaves from some event anyway, assign them to important mages since they'll form a literal meat wall during any assassination attempts (not gonna try trade them with an actual blood nation unless I'm completely desperate, that's just throwing fuel to the fire). And if playing an actual blood nation my field mages having slave "bodyguards" is just the default state.

Indies don't patrol, indies don't assign bodyguard troops, so assassins indeed look quite a lot more effective against them, but beating indies is kinda the lowest bar in dominions, the most basics of basics.

Anyway when I get some more of the pokemon cities done I'll probably try to start an actual game with them to see how they perform in pvp, unless somebody feels like trying just Pewter City and Cerulean City against the vanilla EA nations.

[lord_khaine]

Scouts cost precious commander points from your forts until you luck out in an indie scout province (and the pokemon nations don't have cheap normal scouts for recruitment, they start at hiker/maid).

And it's still half as slow as a solid expansion party because the assassin always needs to spend one turn moving then one turn doing the actual assassination. And if the province has more than one commander (sometimes they may have half a dozen), then that can reall be a bump.

Any leader recruited out of a fort can be used. You just need 1 per assasin team.

For that matter. Its some shockingly high expectations you have to assasins.
I do understand if they disapoint you when you want them to be able to keep up with an army.
But they are often just 1/4 to 1/5 the gold cost of an army that can clear reliably without attrition.
So of course they also work in more or less the same speed.


Minimal time and resources that can then be changed somewhere else if you play smart. Like in our first game here Abyssia tried to rely on assassins to cover their forts, but I was one step ahead and had 5 heavy infantry attached to every each of my commanders to stop that ahead of time. That was just +50 gold and zero commander recruitment investment per field commander, and the troops were still helping break down the fort's walls and could be assigned to other duties. That's for field commanders moving out mind you, forts can and should have a general patrol force instead to rout out basic enemy scouts if nothing else. Information is power, and negating information to your opponent is taking their power.

Its not what i call minimal if your paying a 50 gold tax and x resource tax per commander.
That is troops who suddenly dont contribute to the actual army fighting.

[Aeson]

Why is it that none of the Water pokemon - including those set to be recruited from underwater forts only - for Cerulean City are amphibious/aquatic?

[deuterio12]

Any leader recruited out of a fort can be used. You just need 1 per assasin team.

For that matter. Its some shockingly high expectations you have to assasins.
I do understand if they disapoint you when you want them to be able to keep up with an army.
But they are often just 1/4 to 1/5 the gold cost of an army that can clear reliably without attrition.
So of course they also work in more or less the same speed.

If you need 500 gold for an expansion party, you're kinda doing it wrong. Lots of nations can pump out effective expansion parties at around 300 gold (or cheaper if going with some uber bless), and the pokemon assassins are costing over 100 gold now. Each. Most indie provinces have at least two commanders so the assassins aren't even half as cheap as an actual expansion force.

And time is money. The sooner you conquer provinces, the sooner they start paying taxes to your coffers.

Plus it's a race against everybody else. The longer you take conquering indies, the higher the risk enemies will take the indies near you first.

We were just talking about the earth snake moments ago, speed of expansion is worth sinking a lot of points in a monster pretender and risking them in the frontline even at the cost of scales and bless.



Its not what i call minimal if your paying a 50 gold tax and x resource tax per commander.
That is troops who suddenly dont contribute to the actual army fighting.

Quite in the contrary, thanks to the way morale work, even troops hanging in the back help keep the army fighting for longer than if they weren't there by adding to the HP total.

Plus they hanging in the back is always a nice safety in case some enemies do manage to outflank your frontline or surprise fliers or something.

[deuterio12]

Why is it that none of the Water pokemon - including those set to be recruited from underwater forts only - for Cerulean City are amphibious/aquatic?

...

Because I made a typo and then copy-pasta'd it for all the cerulean pokemons.

Hotfix version. (https://www.mediafire.com/file/bp9xn048xqi71a9/pokemon022.rar/file)

[lord_khaine]

If you need 500 gold for an expansion party, you're kinda doing it wrong. Lots of nations can pump out effective expansion parties at around 300 gold (or cheaper if going with some uber bless), and the pokemon assassins are costing over 100 gold now. Each. Most indie provinces have at least two commanders so the assassins aren't even half as cheap as an actual expansion force.

And time is money. The sooner you conquer provinces, the sooner they start paying taxes to your coffers.

Plus it's a race against everybody else. The longer you take conquering indies, the higher the risk enemies will take the indies near you first.

We were just talking about the earth snake moments ago, speed of expansion is worth sinking a lot of points in a monster pretender and risking them in the frontline even at the cost of scales and bless.

I said without attrition. I would like to see you designing a 300 gold expansion party for every nation that can clear 40 barbarians.
Without screwing up your middle game :P

And yes its a race. Thats why you send armies for the chokepoints. And assasins off to clear corners.


Quite in the contrary, thanks to the way morale work, even troops hanging in the back help keep the army fighting for longer than if they weren't there by adding to the HP total.

... i dont considder acting as cheerleader fighting :smalltongue:

[deuterio12]

I said without attrition.

Assassins die now and then and thus suffer attrition too.



I would like to see you designing a 300 gold expansion party for every nation that can clear 40 barbarians.
Without screwing up your middle game :P

You know how many nations are there in the game? That would take days of work at minimum to write all down.

So instead I'll just point out that you start the game with only 400 gold and probably even less than that in income and you'll want to spend 100-200 of that gold in a mage each turn to get your research corps started and capture some 15 provinces minimum plus get a fort with lab completed in the first year (so another 1200ish gold you need to set aside) so being able to produce 300ish gold expansion parties is a necessity for having a shot at winning the game.



And yes its a race. Thats why you send armies for the chokepoints. And assasins off to clear corners.

Having safe corners is a luxury, not something you can count on.



... i dont considder acting as cheerleader fighting :smalltongue:

So mages casting iron/fog warriors/strength of giants/will of the fates aren't helping with the fighting? :smallamused:

[Knaight]

You know how many nations are there in the game? That would take days of work at minimum to write all down.

Barbarians are also a bit of an edge case that suggests different troop composition than your usual armies. Which basically means that if you can mass archers or slingers to deal with them you should mass archers or slingers to deal with them.

[deuterio12]

Barbarians are also a bit of an edge case that suggests different troop composition than your usual armies. Which basically means that if you can mass archers or slingers to deal with them you should mass archers or slingers to deal with them.

If you have troops with long reach weapons like pikers available that works well against both barbarians and most kind of indies. Super dodgy sacreds with even a minor bless can easily clear most indies too.

[Knaight]

True, but those are a little more niche (I also played way more Dom 3 than 4 or 5, and the changes to the repel mechanic don't always immediately come to mind) - and if you're expanding with blessed sacreds you probably have a bless strategy, which makes massing cheap armies a lot easier as a rule. The old days of F9W9 Mictlan really showed this; 100 gold in troops goes a long way when they have vastly better stats and double the turns of everyone else plus flaming weapons.

[deuterio12]

In dom 4 there was the Nature 9/Death 9 combo that granted basically +36 HP per jaguar warrior plus extra AN damage which was as good as flaming weapons against medium armor and actually better against anything more armored, in particular it allowed jaguar warriors to threaten even super protected thugs and SCs who would fail some MR checks. Then add B9 on top for the evulz so the enemy kill themselves while trying to chew through all the HP the jaguar warriors have.

However in dominions 5 the top blesses demand having an awake pretender so double/triple 9 isn't really possible anymore, but in the other hand minor/medium blesses are quite affordable with the new customization system. No need to get all the way to fire 9 to get flaming weapons now for example, or you can grab something like +2 attack/defense/str/extra speed with a dormant elemental rainbow.

[lord_khaine]

Assassins die now and then and thus suffer attrition too.

Yes, thats why i though assasins who would win around 95% of all fights against indies were so valuable.


You know how many nations are there in the game? That would take days of work at minimum to write all down.

So instead I'll just point out that you start the game with only 400 gold and probably even less than that in income and you'll want to spend 100-200 of that gold in a mage each turn to get your research corps started and capture some 15 provinces minimum plus get a fort with lab completed in the first year (so another 1200ish gold you need to set aside) so being able to produce 300ish gold expansion parties is a necessity for having a shot at winning the game.


Yeah, i just said it like i doubted you could do it.
Not that i actually expected you to do so.
But a 300 gold party can be as little as 1 commander and 20 men.
I dont expect them to last though 5-7 fights.


Having safe corners is a luxury, not something you can count on.

Its easily something you can assign for yourself if you just plan your expansion a little.


So mages casting iron/fog warriors/strength of giants/will of the fates aren't helping with the fighting?

Oh no thats a collosal contribution to battle outcome.
I just dont see what that question has to do with anything :smallconfused:

[Aeson]

Its easily something you can assign for yourself if you just plan your expansion a little.
Depends a lot on the map, where you start in it, where your neighbors are, and what your neighbors are doing.

[deuterio12]

Pokemon 0.23 (https://www.mediafire.com/file/w74vt4pismt048h/pokemon023.rar/file) version, mostly national spells for Cerulean City.

Also preparing Vermilion City, rough ideas:
-Strong air magic, some earth for magnemites/magnetons... Welp that's kinda it. Maybe a bit of astral since Raichus would eventually have a psychic alternate version and fire to represent the voltorb/electrode's RAGE plus electric pokemon are usually hotblooded.
-Voltorbs and electrodes explode on death.
-Zapdos unique summon.
-Magnetites and magnetons as high protection tanks.
-Electabuzz big HP/Str size 3 ogreish.
-Pikachus.
-More pikachus.
-Even more pikachus.
-There's really few generation 1 electric pokemon but quite a lot of pikachu variants. So cheap pikachu militia with crappy stats, fast moving pikachus with quick attack, pikachu ranged artillery, vanilla pikachu, luchador sacred cap-only pikachu. Only the vanilla can actually evolve into a Raichu.

[lord_khaine]

Cant argue against the though of sending hordes upon hordes of electric rodents to their death.
What is it now the city count is up to?

[deuterio12]

Only Pewter and Cerulean cities so far, Vermillion will be the third.

How do immortal voltorbs and electrodes explode on death and I added immortality since, well, you can always get them back. For now coded as normal immortality (aka no need of dominion) with reduced respawn of just 1 month, but I'm open to arguments for other approaches.

Plus sprinkinling some unrest generation on those and other non-pikachu pokemon since they seem to cause all sorts of trouble with daily life. Gentlemen non-mage commanders will passively reduce unrest and have patrol bonus as a way to mitigate that.

Rockers will be seducers non-mage commanders.

[deuterio12]

Pokemon 0.30 (https://www.mediafire.com/file/902q1doqe33ricm/pokemon030.rar/file) with Vermillion City included! Most human trainers using the basic sprites and no national spells yet but otherwise plenty of pikachu variants to be sent to the meatgrinder!

[lord_khaine]

How many towns are there suposed to be?
I though it less relevant to comment on balance before they majority were done.

[deuterio12]

For EA, the red/blue/silver/gold towns that nicely cover all first 16 pokemon types besides Dark.

But it would be pretty useful if you start commenting on balance now since I'm kinda trying to follow a formula here. Like how best to implement resistances/vulnerabities, or about the human trainer mages which basically just switch colors and one or other extra ability between cities (Pewter ones get mountain survival, Cerulean get sailing, Vermillion actually get nothing unique for now, maybe every trainer gets a bit of unrest reduction?).

Or which pokemon should each trainer auto-summon at the start of battle and how many.

Plus internal balance if nothing else, like if one of the current cities feels too strong/weak compared to the others available or if there's one pokemon troop you want to spam at the exclusion of everything else for a faction or if there's a pokemon you'll never want to recruit for a faction besides magikarp those are supposed to suck until you can get one to evolve

[lord_khaine]

Well alright sure.
I will start by playing a year with each of them.
And try to give me my initial expression on each.
What town should be used as baseline for comparison?

And.. what should be done to make the mod work?
It seems a lot more complex that the previous one i have tested

[Aeson]

And.. what should be done to make the mod work?
It seems a lot more complex that the previous one i have tested
Extracting it to whatever directory you use for mods should work fine.

[lord_khaine]

well yeah i tried that.
But got a message saying the mod contains 36 errors.
And the game crashed when i tried to start.

[tyckspoon]

well yeah i tried that.
But got a message saying the mod contains 36 errors.
And the game crashed when i tried to start.

I think this usually is a problem with the sprite files - image not found, in wrong file format, too large, or similar.

[deuterio12]

Derp, had accidentally moved several sprites from the Brock folder to the surge folder and that makes the game crash when the game tries to load images that aren't in the right place and I didn't bother checking Pewter City after working on Vermillion. :smalleek:

Fixed version (http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=15584270283256453877), also includes Vermillion City national spells and Zapdos.

Still some 18 errors, not sure what they are but the game shouldn't crash right away at least.

Thanks a lot for the offer to test Lord Kahine, it's a great help!



What town should be used as baseline for comparison?

Well Pewter City was the first made and is relatively simpler so probably that one.

[lord_khaine]

Your welcome, its a very interesting project :smallsmile:
Ill write again when i have had a chance to test pewter city.

[Olinser]

Now that a couple games have finished (or about to finish), I'm going to try and create another pairs Disciple game. I'll make another thread for recruitment, if anybody is interested post there, I'll make a Discord shortly.

I'd like to see at least 5 teams for a good FFA, but we'll see where we go based on how many people are interested.

[lord_khaine]

Pewter first impression

-They have some really powerful sacreds. Seems a crime not to take advantage of this somehow.
-The nation symbol is perhaps just a little to large. Kinda annoying at that size.
-Geodudes with an Onyx Tank expand quite well.
-Regular Rhyhorn works quite in a group of 10
-Generally the pokemon munch indie provinces with minimal casulties.
-The promotion mechanic is quite interesting
-They have some really good units, that are really expensive.

Initially i think Pewter City is internally balanced.
I dont really think there are any of the unit that stands out as noticeably better than the others.
Or well, those that do are recruitment capped.

[deuterio12]

Pewter first impression

-They have some really powerful sacreds. Seems a crime not to take advantage of this somehow.
-The nation symbol is perhaps just a little to large. Kinda annoying at that size.
-Geodudes with an Onyx Tank expand quite well.
-Regular Rhyhorn works quite in a group of 10
-Generally the pokemon munch indie provinces with minimal casulties.
-The promotion mechanic is quite interesting
-They have some really good units, that are really expensive.

Initially i think Pewter City is internally balanced.
I dont really think there are any of the unit that stands out as noticeably better than the others.
Or well, those that do are recruitment capped.


Nice! Will reduce the size of the flag icon.

Also for the record, changing each xp requirement for promotion is possible and easy for basically any amount, so if you feel like something should evolve a bit faster/slower, feel free to point it out.

[lord_khaine]

Hmm.. well yeah right now i think it will play out in a way that results in just about all the members of your expansion armies will evolve.
Then afterwards, when you actually engage in open comflict with the other cities. Then i doubt many others will live long enough for it.

First glance Cerulena

Is a lot harder to play.
And their scouts are overpriced.
I had them lose 3/4 times to a basic infantry commander.

[deuterio12]

Hmmm, which of the following options sounds more interesting:
-Make the cerulean scouts cheaper to reflect they're not very good assassins.
-Buff the base tentacools that the cerulean scout calls.
-Buff the tentacool's poison sting and/or wrap attacks.
-Added a tentacruel to the summons. Been testing it a bit and seems to have a pretty good success rate.

https://i.imgsafe.org/25/25a9690a5f.png
A bersek barbarian chief slaughtered his way through the tentacools and tentacruel then got punched to death by the maid.
One-punch maid.

[lord_khaine]

Hmm.. i do thing something should be done to buff the Maid.
The Tentacools are kinda cool as a concept. Its just a shame that in a assasination attempt it seems like they just stand and watch as they are killed 1 by 1.
Ill make a new post about Cerulean City after i have tried them a second time.
Though it seems like Magicarp is meant to newer evolve?
Since it requires an absurd 100 xp.

[deuterio12]

Yeah, not sure why the tentacools kinda just stand there, but a Tentacruel seems to actually fight so will add that to the Maid's autosummon.

100 exp for magikarp evolution is indeed be too harsh, will drop it to 30.

Thanks again!

[lord_khaine]

Your welcome.
I mean now i can at least see potential uses for this pokemon.
Like giving all your commanders a bodyguard of 5, and then hoping some of them survives long enough to evolve?

Also, i kinda think the ancient Gyrados is wastly overpriced for what it does.
And why does it eat people? Is that a joke im missing?

[deuterio12]

Well as the pokedex entry says "Brutally vicious and enormously destructive. Known for totally destroying cities in ancient times. " Which would include killing people I would say since I doubt a Gyarados would be nice enough to allow everybody to evacuate in time. And we are playing in those ancient times now. :smalltongue:

Will give ancient Gyarados a discount.

EDIT: You mean the legendary Gyarados pretender chassis, right? Or the commander recruit?

[lord_khaine]

Relevant Gyrados link (http://thepunchlineismachismo.com/archives/comic/survival-of-the-cutest)
It can be its only destroying the towns of the unworthy?
I mean, what awake expander does not end up with a count of at least 10-11 towns crushed into obedience?

[deuterio12]

The awake expander who runs into a bunch of hidden indie mages or some terrible luck spawns an army of cave trolls on top

Excellent point, removed friendly unrest and feasting on friendly people/pokemon.

Also that comic would be an excellent example of how things are in a popkill nation where monsters show up out of nowhere and devour people and everybody's just completely chill with zero unrest increase.

[lord_khaine]

Excellent point, removed friendly unrest and feasting on friendly people/pokemon.

Its not a problem when its someone else god snacks on :smallbiggrin:

Well. Cerulean initial impression.

-It seems mainly about hordes and hordes of little squishy things.
-surprisingly hard to figure out a bless for this.
-The detail about slightly to large flag applies here.
-They expand decently.
-Horsea could perhaps use a bit of poison resist. Else they kill themselves.
-Magic Carp school seems like a waste of a spell. That i am worried the AI would cast.
-Turns out this is a bit like playing Jomon. The trick is to get an UW town as fast as possible.
-Like how conjuration has become a bit of a combat path here.

[tyckspoon]

Didn't have time for a test run, but downloaded last link I could find (version name Pokemon031) to check out Cerulean's info screen. First look opinion:

Most of your land-recruit troops are nearly worthless; terrible stats with almost no redeeming features. Like playing Xibalba if you took away the flying lances and forced your crappy man-bat troops to walk across the field and fight the enemy front-line troops. Notable exceptions in Shellder, which at least have enough Protection to hold a line, and Staryu, which have an absurdly accurate ranged attack (this may almost be worth loading up on weapon blesses - if they were recruit anywhere or maybe Cap + underwater so you could actually mass them they'd make a pretty terrifying firebase with maybe something like Farshot + Fire Weapons + .. I dunno Decay Weapons + probably Magic Weapons so you can punch through all the defenses that are countered by that. Thunder Weapons would probably be the best because the stun effect would disrupt the enemy as they tried to advance, but too expensive to take along with extended range.)

You really want to go underwater ASAP and set up a fort there so you can recruit the already evolved version of your troops -they generally look pretty solid.

Tentacool are particularly bad. They have no defensive stats worth speaking about, and their offense is non-existent. Their attacks either need to add Strength, or be Armor Piercing/Armor Negating - as it is they rely on inflicting bonus effects to do anything, but they have such low damage that they have to explode a DRN roll at least once to even pierce standard 10 Protection. As is the only useful thing they can do is die and hope their Acid Splash takes somebody out with them. For Poison Sting, maybe look at things like the Swarm bugs' Tiny Sting or Mind Blast as a guide: Make it Armor Negating but cap damage at 1, so it can reliably inflict its poison but will almost never be the actual direct cause of death. (The superlow damage on their attacks may be why they don't appear to try to fight in assassinations? The AI may be perceiving the attacks as pointless against a higher Protection enemy, leaving it with no 'correct' options to choose so it defaults to 'hold and do nothing'?)
- The Supersonic attack you have on some of the 'mon has a similar problem; it inflicts Confusion as a bonus effect on damage, but has functionally zero chance of actually inflicting damage. Suggest the Mind Blast model here too or just change the actual damage to be 'MR negate apply Confusion'.

- Lapras doesn't look good enough to be worth what you're charging for it (keeping in mind I didn't try to play it, so this is just a stats/cost assessment. The special effects on the attacks may be better than I'm giving it credit for.) Compare to Pewter's Onyx at the same cost. I'd suggest halving its price in both gold and rec points to start, then maybe apply reclimit if you want it to be impossible to spam.
- Recruitable Gyarados champs are a pretty mean-looking heavy thug/light supercombatant, especially with access to two of the major combat-buff paths (Liquid Body/Quicken/Mistform/Mirror Image/Air Shield/at least a few elemental resists, apply according to what you need them to resist.) Only really restrained by lack of body slots to fully customize them, but you can still pop something like a regen ring and a reinvigoration item on them and just let them cut loose.

- Sailor is an abnormally good commander for Early Age; he'd be worth picking up just for the bulk leadership + Morale bonus, let alone the extra mobility/raiding potential for being a Sailing commander (worth extra for being able to shuttle an entire army's worth of units around on his own.) Balance-wise, consider cutting down his command ability some or make him cost 2 command points.

[lord_khaine]

Most of your land-recruit troops are nearly worthless; terrible stats with almost no redeeming features. Like playing Xibalba if you took away the flying lances and forced your crappy man-bat troops to walk across the field and fight the enemy front-line troops. Notable exceptions in Shellder, which at least have enough Protection to hold a line, and Staryu, which have an absurdly accurate ranged attack (this may almost be worth loading up on weapon blesses - if they were recruit anywhere or maybe Cap + underwater so you could actually mass them they'd make a pretty terrifying firebase with maybe something like Farshot + Fire Weapons + .. I dunno Decay Weapons + probably Magic Weapons so you can punch through all the defenses that are countered by that. Thunder Weapons would probably be the best because the stun effect would disrupt the enemy as they tried to advance, but too expensive to take along with extended range.)

The land things actually expand decently well. Yes they have garbage stats. But they all shoot and are dirt cheap.
It is early age after all. Not a lot of things have armor.

I made expansion armies with Krappys, Horsea, PsyDuck, Slowpoke (also minor error in slowpoke description)
Though yeah i could not really figure out what to do about Lapras either.

As for the Sailor commander. I think he is desperately needed.
Since its a nation with hordes and hordes of cheap chaff. Then you badly need need his massive leadership.

[deuterio12]

Its not a problem when its someone else god snacks on :smallbiggrin:

Well. Cerulean initial impression.

-It seems mainly about hordes and hordes of little squishy things.
-surprisingly hard to figure out a bless for this.
-The detail about slightly to large flag applies here.
-They expand decently.
-Horsea could perhaps use a bit of poison resist. Else they kill themselves.
-Magic Carp school seems like a waste of a spell. That i am worried the AI would cast.
-Turns out this is a bit like playing Jomon. The trick is to get an UW town as fast as possible.
-Like how conjuration has become a bit of a combat path here.


Ok, seems like I figured out how to properly reduce flag size, I need to leave some empty space or the game will amplify it.

Added poison resist to Horsea and Seadra.

Removed magikarp school spell.

Nice about the conjuration spells. But you noticed Pewter City also has some of those, right?


Didn't have time for a test run, but downloaded last link I could find (version name Pokemon031) to check out Cerulean's info screen. First look opinion:

Most of your land-recruit troops are nearly worthless; terrible stats with almost no redeeming features. Like playing Xibalba if you took away the flying lances and forced your crappy man-bat troops to walk across the field and fight the enemy front-line troops. Notable exceptions in Shellder, which at least have enough Protection to hold a line, and Staryu, which have an absurdly accurate ranged attack (this may almost be worth loading up on weapon blesses - if they were recruit anywhere or maybe Cap + underwater so you could actually mass them they'd make a pretty terrifying firebase with maybe something like Farshot + Fire Weapons + .. I dunno Decay Weapons + probably Magic Weapons so you can punch through all the defenses that are countered by that. Thunder Weapons would probably be the best because the stun effect would disrupt the enemy as they tried to advance, but too expensive to take along with extended range.)

You really want to go underwater ASAP and set up a fort there so you can recruit the already evolved version of your troops -they generally look pretty solid.

Staryus can be recruited underwater besides coastal province even if it doesn't say in the frontal description.

As lord_khaine pointed out don't understimate lots of cheap stuff spamming ranged attacks.



Tentacool are particularly bad. They have no defensive stats worth speaking about, and their offense is non-existent. Their attacks either need to add Strength, or be Armor Piercing/Armor Negating - as it is they rely on inflicting bonus effects to do anything, but they have such low damage that they have to explode a DRN roll at least once to even pierce standard 10 Protection. As is the only useful thing they can do is die and hope their Acid Splash takes somebody out with them. For Poison Sting, maybe look at things like the Swarm bugs' Tiny Sting or Mind Blast as a guide: Make it Armor Negating but cap damage at 1, so it can reliably inflict its poison but will almost never be the actual direct cause of death. (The superlow damage on their attacks may be why they don't appear to try to fight in assassinations? The AI may be perceiving the attacks as pointless against a higher Protection enemy, leaving it with no 'correct' options to choose so it defaults to 'hold and do nothing'?)

The attacks were already adding Strength, just that tentacools aren't exactly muscle builders. But using the armornegating+1 damage max sounds like a nice improvement do applied it.



- The Supersonic attack you have on some of the 'mon has a similar problem; it inflicts Confusion as a bonus effect on damage, but has functionally zero chance of actually inflicting damage. Suggest the Mind Blast model here too or just change the actual damage to be 'MR negate apply Confusion'.

Ups, my bad. Changed to apply directly confusion. No MR check but no acuraccy bonus either.



- Lapras doesn't look good enough to be worth what you're charging for it (keeping in mind I didn't try to play it, so this is just a stats/cost assessment. The special effects on the attacks may be better than I'm giving it credit for.) Compare to Pewter's Onyx at the same cost. I'd suggest halving its price in both gold and rec points to start, then maybe apply reclimit if you want it to be impossible to spam.

Halved gold and recruitment point cost.



- Recruitable Gyarados champs are a pretty mean-looking heavy thug/light supercombatant, especially with access to two of the major combat-buff paths (Liquid Body/Quicken/Mistform/Mirror Image/Air Shield/at least a few elemental resists, apply according to what you need them to resist.) Only really restrained by lack of body slots to fully customize them, but you can still pop something like a regen ring and a reinvigoration item on them and just let them cut loose.

Well, they are supposed to be nasty.



- Sailor is an abnormally good commander for Early Age; he'd be worth picking up just for the bulk leadership + Morale bonus, let alone the extra mobility/raiding potential for being a Sailing commander (worth extra for being able to shuttle an entire army's worth of units around on his own.) Balance-wise, consider cutting down his command ability some or make him cost 2 command points.

It may be a bit too OP in other nation with more elitish troops, but for Cerulean City that as lord_khaine kindly pointed out needs to spam hordes of cheap stuff with not that good morale, it's kinda needed. Consider the Xibalbians get a flying priest commander with great leadership too.

Anyway:

New version (http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=77403119316111010013), four cities so far, Pewter, Cerulean, Vermillion and Celadon.

Changelog besides new stuff added:
-Poison sting and Constrict attacks are now armor negating but capped at 1 damage.
-Flag size reduced.
-All gyarados unrest generation and popkill removed.
-Fixed Slowpoke description.
-Legendary Gyarados discounted to 200 base (180 with national discount).
-Lapras gold and recruitment point cost halved.


https://i.imgsafe.org/45/4550c887ac.png

[lord_khaine]

The attacks were already adding Strength, just that tentacools aren't exactly muscle builders. But using the armornegating+1 damage max sounds like a nice improvement do applied it.

That would make the maids much more effective at assasinating people.


Halved gold and recruitment point cost.

Having looked at them some more. Then i am wondering if their main strenght lies in countering other monster pokemon.
Their water blasts hit like a truck. A team of those targeting large enemy monsters could prove unusually effective.
But that is purely theory.


- Recruitable Gyarados champs are a pretty mean-looking heavy thug/light supercombatant, especially with access to two of the major combat-buff paths (Liquid Body/Quicken/Mistform/Mirror Image/Air Shield/at least a few elemental resists, apply according to what you need them to resist.) Only really restrained by lack of body slots to fully customize them, but you can still pop something like a regen ring and a reinvigoration item on them and just let them cut loose.

I missed those. Where do you recruit Gyarados?


New version, four cities so far, Pewter, Cerulean, Vermillion and Celadon.

Awesome. Thats already enough for a small test game.
I will try and find time to look at Vermillion next though.

[deuterio12]

Having looked at them some more. Then i am wondering if their main strenght lies in countering other monster pokemon.
Their water blasts hit like a truck. A team of those targeting large enemy monsters could prove unusually effective.
But that is purely theory.

Yeah they were kinda intended as heavy artillery. In theory.



I missed those. Where do you recruit Gyarados?


You can recruit the champion versions in mountains. No direct way to recruit the troop version right now but I'm open to suggestions (perhaps in mountains too up to 1 per turn?)



Awesome. Thats already enough for a small test game.
I will try and find time to look at Vermillion next though.

:smallbiggrin:

And yeah I would be up for a small test game if there's a couple other people interested.

Or heck we could even do a 1x1 between us.

[lord_khaine]

Yeah they were kinda intended as heavy artillery. In theory.

It can be they are actually worth more in that role.
They are clearly not useful for clearing indie provinces. All the pokemon nations so far trash those.
But perhaps they are worth their cost against other nations. Could settle for an initial 50 gold discount.


You can recruit the champion versions in mountains. No direct way to recruit the troop version right now but I'm open to suggestions (perhaps in mountains too up to 1 per turn?)


Isnt swamp a more natural habitat for either version?
Thats certainly where i would live if i were a giant monster snake.


And yeah I would be up for a small test game if there's a couple other people interested.

Or heck we could even do a 1x1 between us.

Would be awesome if we could find 2 other people for it.
A 4 people game gives a better idea of internal balance when people cant tailor their bless directly.
But a 1x1 game would still give a better idea on how nations interact than playing against AI.

First though i want to look at Pikachu city.

[deuterio12]

It can be they are actually worth more in that role.
They are clearly not useful for clearing indie provinces. All the pokemon nations so far trash those.
But perhaps they are worth their cost against other nations. Could settle for an initial 50 gold discount.

So 150 or 50 gold?



Isnt swamp a more natural habitat for either version?
Thats certainly where i would live if i were a giant monster snake.

Hmmm, that sounds better yes. Also swamps rarer than mountains. Will do.

I'm thinking of adding them at the cap too like the Onyx with 1/month rec limit.



Would be awesome if we could find 2 other people for it.
A 4 people game gives a better idea of internal balance when people cant tailor their bless directly.
But a 1x1 game would still give a better idea on how nations interact than playing against AI.

First though i want to look at Pikachu city.

Sure!

[lord_khaine]

So 150 or 50 gold?

When your potentially blasting a pair of medium pokemon each round, then yes i think 150 gold is a good starting point.
We should likely also keep in mind, that since pokemon lacks shields, then ranged attacks like these will be Super Effective.


Hmmm, that sounds better yes. Also swamps rarer than mountains. Will do.

I'm thinking of adding them at the cap too like the Onyx with 1/month rec limit.

I think it would balance with how the pretty powerful Onyx is found in a cave?
But being allowed to recruit 1/month is likely a good call.

[deuterio12]

New version 0.42 (http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=02298571844562928415)

Changelog:
-Fixed a couple missing/misnamed sprites.
-Went around converting all capital letters in the image file and path names to normal size which removed most of the reported errors, still 4 hanging around not very sure why. all the reported errors.
-Beam attacks now have aoe property since it seems like otherwise #beam doesn't do anything special.
-Lapras cost bumped up to 150 gold/75 recruitment
-Gyarados troop now recruitable at Cerulean City capital and swamps, Gyarados Champion switched from mountains to swamps.

EDIT: Last errors were found, some missed capital letters, uploaded 0.42 which is error free.

[tyckspoon]

New version 0.42 (http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=02298571844562928415)

Changelog:

-Beam attacks now have aoe property since it seems like otherwise #beam doesn't do anything special.
-Lapras cost bumped up to 150 gold/75 recruitment
-


I know #beam is used to make things like the drake breath attacks; not sure how it interacts with range and Area to actually define the affected squares (extends to range covering area width in squares, I think?) Should be careful with that one, recruitable beam throwers are going to be really tricky to balance.

[deuterio12]

I know #beam is used to make things like the drake breath attacks; not sure how it interacts with range and Area to actually define the affected squares (extends to range covering area width in squares, I think?) Should be careful with that one, recruitable beam throwers are going to be really tricky to balance.

Checking in another forum, it seems like when using #Beam the range is how "long" the beam is while #aoe is how "wide" the beam is, so if no aoe is defined the beam has no width and basically doesn't do anything special.

As for recruitable beam throwers, vanilla EA/MA Abyssia already have their salamanders and they're usually considered more in the weakish side of things than anything.

Also don't suppose you would be interested in a small test game with me and Lord_Khaine and anybody else interested?

[lord_khaine]

Vermillion first impression

-Oh god its pikachu everywhere?
-Yikes the Pikachu Libre seems like the mother of all counterthugs. I can easily imagine one of them suplexing an Onyx now..
-The gentlemen are not good assasins
-A lot of the regular pikachu have trouble with any sort of ranged attack. You likely need to lead them with a commander that has line formation.
-The guitarist is expensive but pretty good. First test game she earned her keep by stealing 2 wizards for me.
-Its hard to see if the supersonic attack does anything now.
-There are several viable expansion options.

[tyckspoon]

As for recruitable beam throwers, vanilla EA/MA Abyssia already have their salamanders and they're usually considered more in the weakish side of things than anything.

Also don't suppose you would be interested in a small test game with me and Lord_Khaine and anybody else interested?

Salamanders don't beam, they have an AoE melee attack. And they're already pretty good, even with needing to enter melee and their crippling encumbrance - Abyssia's weakness has more to do with Plan A being 'set it on fire' with B through D all being 'crap I don't know maybe more fire.' Recruitable beams is more like being able to recruit Fire Drakes.

[deuterio12]

Vermillion first impression

-Oh god its pikachu everywhere?
-Yikes the Pikachu Libre seems like the mother of all counterthugs. I can easily imagine one of them suplexing an Onyx now..
-The gentlemen are not good assasins
-A lot of the regular pikachu have trouble with any sort of ranged attack. You likely need to lead them with a commander that has line formation.
-The guitarist is expensive but pretty good. First test game she earned her keep by stealing 2 wizards for me.
-Its hard to see if the supersonic attack does anything now.
-There are several viable expansion options.


-Well there's really few electric pokemons in the first games so I had to fill the ranks somehow.
-Seems like Pikachu Libre worthy of his 60 gold price tag. Still the Onyx just needs to land a single blow to squash them.
-Gentleman will get buffed with summoning a trio of pikachu runners and one pikachu thunderer on top of the two sacred pikachus.
-Pikachus vulnerable to arrows yes, but did you try screening them with magnetites?
-Guitarrist performing well is good (pun intended).
-Will add a flying sprite to supersonic.
-Multiple expansion options is good. Care to be a bit more specific?

Thanks once more!


Salamanders don't beam, they have an AoE melee attack. And they're already pretty good, even with needing to enter melee and their crippling encumbrance - Abyssia's weakness has more to do with Plan A being 'set it on fire' with B through D all being 'crap I don't know maybe more fire.' Recruitable beams is more like being able to recruit Fire Drakes.

Thing is, Abyssia's the only nation that naturally resists fire accross their whole rooster (in contrast with lots of nations that resist cold), so if salamanders were "pretty good", then how come we never see Abyssia dominating early game with salamander rushes before anybody can research actual fire resistance?

Ditto for fire drakes. Despite options for multiplying their summons, they're more of a last-ditch option than exactly something anybody considers important enough to plan their strategy around. Most players will rather spend their gems in lightless lanterns or fire elementals that lack any kind of beam attack and only last 1 battle.

If anything, half the time I meet Abyssia in MP they're summoning masses of devils and horrors and whatnot. That's their actual plan B, with salamanders being barely a part of plan "kill it with fire!" A.

[lord_khaine]

Pikachu Libre is for that matter also quite efficient at clearing indies with just a little bit of screening chaff. Like the runners.
The gentleman's pikachu isnt sacred though. And yeah its kinda weird. Twice in a row they lost to a barbarian chief who just ran in and smacked him in the face.
Perhaps just give him 1 more pikachu and a price discount of like 20 gold? He is also a commander. That is quite effective.

I did look at screening them with magmites. But its hard for the melee version.
And magmites are slow. found it amost as easy to just send pure magmites in to clean up.
Or get flying pikachu's to hand archers. They are nasty in large packs.


Thing is, Abyssia's the only nation that naturally resists fire accross their whole rooster (in contrast with lots of nations that resist cold), so if salamanders were "pretty good", then how come we never see Abyssia dominating early game with salamander rushes before anybody can research actual fire resistance?

I think thats because salamanders are undisicplined and expensive, while also being kinda fragile.

[deuterio12]

Pikachu Libre is for that matter also quite efficient at clearing indies with just a little bit of screening chaff. Like the runners.
The gentleman's pikachu isnt sacred though. And yeah its kinda weird. Twice in a row they lost to a barbarian chief who just ran in and smacked him in the face.
Perhaps just give him 1 more pikachu and a price discount of like 20 gold? He is also a commander. That is quite effective.

I did look at screening them with magmites. But its hard for the melee version.
And magmites are slow. found it amost as easy to just send pure magmites in to clean up.
Or get flying pikachu's to hand archers. They are nasty in large packs.

Ups, forgot the #holy tag there.

Ok, will do as you suggest for the gentleman. In particular since Vermillion already has the guitarrist seducer.

Looks like pikachu combined tactics are pretty effective, just as planned.



I think thats because salamanders are undisicplined and expensive, while also being kinda fragile.

Which goes to show how great offense potential can be balanced by being expensive and/or relatively squishy. And the beam pokemon are considerably more expensive (in particular recruitment points, salamanders only 15 each) even if tougher.

[lord_khaine]

Ups, forgot the #holy tag there.

Of course.. less relevant since he cant bless them.


Ok, will do as you suggest for the gentleman. In particular since Vermillion already has the guitarrist seducer.

Yeah all the assasins dont have to be equally viable for everything.


Which goes to show how great offense potential can be balanced by being expensive and/or relatively squishy. And the beam pokemon are considerably more expensive (in particular recruitment points, salamanders only 15 each) even if tougher.

True. Though beams are also orders of magnitude more safe than the salamanders melee splash attack.
½ the time it gets stabbed before it does anything.

[lord_khaine]

Rainbowtown initial impression

-looks like the most diverse town so far.
-large selection of very different commanders. Some gives a pretty good deal on their pokemon companions
-Something is wrong with Venosaur. It kills itself when it uses Solar beam
-Minor spelling error on Erika
-Im not entirely certain if Beauty X's ability to freespawn chaff is OP or not. But i suspect it can grow out of proportions if allowed alone to long.

[tyckspoon]

Rainbowtown initial impression

-Something is wrong with Venosaur. It kills itself when it uses Solar beam


'Beam' attacks start in the same square as the attacker, so they can and usually will hit themselves; basically the same thing you mentioned with the Horsea where they'd kill themselves by standing around in their own poison clouds. I vaguely remember there was a patch note a while back related to the Dragon pretenders which basically said 'Upped Dragon elemental resists so they don't kill themselves with their own breath.'

Edit: Celadon's Cooltrainer should probably have at least some of its possible nature randoms taken off. It's very low probability, but currently it can get up to Nature 7 if everything falls right, and it's quite likely to be Nature 4 + other crosspaths. Maybe something like a single 50% random Nature, if you want a high proportion of them to hit that Nature 4, and then 3 randoms from the crosspaths? Doesn't feel right to have a recruitable mage that even has the chance to hit levels you otherwise have to build a Pretender to do.

Edit Edit: Mixed up some weapon IDs somewhere, a number of Celadon's pokemon have the Petal Dance attack (very widespread - almost all of Pikachutown's basic attacks have been replaced with Petal Dance.) Shiny Pikachu has Trample, for some reason. Using beam attacks as liberally as you did for things like Bubble Beam and Hyper Beam is probably also going to result in a lot of unintentionally self-destructing pokemon.

(Checked on Pewter for the Petal Dance thing - it's only showing up on Geodude and its evolutions. I think you over-wrote Tackle.)

- Should do a pass on your Pretender costs. There needs to a be minimum cost for the pretender chassis alone, and most of your Legendary Pokemon chassis are overly cheap (presumably because the autocalc looks at them and correctly assesses that they're pretty terrible combat bodies, but that's not what you'd be selecting them for.) Legendary Pikachu is particularly silly for this, as you have it at base Dominion 3 for a mere 10 points for the chassis - that's such a cheap body as to be worth nearly the same as taking your god Dormant!

- One of your attacks in Cerulean (might be the Slowing effect on Bubble? So far I've mostly seen it with massed Krabbys.) is doing something really weird. I'm getting victims that are Entangled, Blind, Starving (as if they had no supplies), Enraged, and have an untagged additional affliction - it just says 'seems as if something is missing (no information.)' This might be one of your remaining errors. Another is probably Tentacruel - 'recruit terrain is undefined.'
- Confirmed it's 'Slowed', just watched a Tentacool Constrict somebody and apply all sorts of side effects that I have to assume are unintended :smallamused:

- Poison Sting doesn't seem to be working right either; might be the 'Acid' damage typing doing something weird? I can see hits, but they're creating an area cloud particle that fades after one round, and they don't look like it's applying Poison.
- Tentacruel/cool (in Assassinations, at least, have not tried as troops) still aren't actively attacking. They'll fire Poison Stings and fight back if something approaches them, but still do not try to actively approach the enemy (the round I had with a Barbarian they also stopped trying to shoot at it once it got within melee range, which is weird. Something in their defines appears to be shutting them down once enemy is within a certain distance.)

- Yup, Seadra just kill themselves as soon as they try to use Bubblebeam.

- Took a Dormant Veteran Trainer (male chassis.) He just woke up. He's 309 years old out of max age 90. I expect he'll keel over dead next Winter.

[lord_khaine]

Should do a pass on your Pretender costs. There needs to a be minimum cost for the pretender chassis alone, and most of your Legendary Pokemon chassis are overly cheap (presumably because the autocalc looks at them and correctly assesses that they're pretty terrible combat bodies, but that's not what you'd be selecting them for.) Legendary Pikachu is particularly silly for this, as you have it at base Dominion 3 for a mere 10 points for the chassis - that's such a cheap body as to be worth nearly the same as taking your god Dormant!

Yeah the pretender costs should likely be analysed seperatly.
But i actually think legendary Pikachu is correctly costed. It seems more or less worthless except as a way to get a really high Air magic score.
I were newer tempted to look at it in any of my test games.

[deuterio12]

Rainbowtown initial impression

-looks like the most diverse town so far.
-large selection of very different commanders. Some gives a pretty good deal on their pokemon companions
-Something is wrong with Venosaur. It kills itself when it uses Solar beam
-Minor spelling error on Erika
-Im not entirely certain if Beauty X's ability to freespawn chaff is OP or not. But i suspect it can grow out of proportions if allowed alone to long.


Thanks! Will look at those with more care later!

Although with me messing up and making petal dance replace tackle means your vermillion review may be skewed since several of those pikachus would be hitting much harder in melee.


'Beam' attacks start in the same square as the attacker, so they can and usually will hit themselves; basically the same thing you mentioned with the Horsea where they'd kill themselves by standing around in their own poison clouds. I vaguely remember there was a patch note a while back related to the Dragon pretenders which basically said 'Upped Dragon elemental resists so they don't kill themselves with their own breath.'

Edit: Celadon's Cooltrainer should probably have at least some of its possible nature randoms taken off. It's very low probability, but currently it can get up to Nature 7 if everything falls right, and it's quite likely to be Nature 4 + other crosspaths. Maybe something like a single 50% random Nature, if you want a high proportion of them to hit that Nature 4, and then 3 randoms from the crosspaths? Doesn't feel right to have a recruitable mage that even has the chance to hit levels you otherwise have to build a Pretender to do.

Edit Edit: Mixed up some weapon IDs somewhere, a number of Celadon's pokemon have the Petal Dance attack (very widespread - almost all of Pikachutown's basic attacks have been replaced with Petal Dance.) Shiny Pikachu has Trample, for some reason. Using beam attacks as liberally as you did for things like Bubble Beam and Hyper Beam is probably also going to result in a lot of unintentionally self-destructing pokemon.

(Checked on Pewter for the Petal Dance thing - it's only showing up on Geodude and its evolutions. I think you over-wrote Tackle.)

- Should do a pass on your Pretender costs. There needs to a be minimum cost for the pretender chassis alone, and most of your Legendary Pokemon chassis are overly cheap (presumably because the autocalc looks at them and correctly assesses that they're pretty terrible combat bodies, but that's not what you'd be selecting them for.) Legendary Pikachu is particularly silly for this, as you have it at base Dominion 3 for a mere 10 points for the chassis - that's such a cheap body as to be worth nearly the same as taking your god Dormant!

- One of your attacks in Cerulean (might be the Slowing effect on Bubble? So far I've mostly seen it with massed Krabbys.) is doing something really weird. I'm getting victims that are Entangled, Blind, Starving (as if they had no supplies), Enraged, and have an untagged additional affliction - it just says 'seems as if something is missing (no information.)' This might be one of your remaining errors. Another is probably Tentacruel - 'recruit terrain is undefined.'
- Confirmed it's 'Slowed', just watched a Tentacool Constrict somebody and apply all sorts of side effects that I have to assume are unintended :smallamused:

- Poison Sting doesn't seem to be working right either; might be the 'Acid' damage typing doing something weird? I can see hits, but they're creating an area cloud particle that fades after one round, and they don't look like it's applying Poison.
- Tentacruel/cool (in Assassinations, at least, have not tried as troops) still aren't actively attacking. They'll fire Poison Stings and fight back if something approaches them, but still do not try to actively approach the enemy (the round I had with a Barbarian they also stopped trying to shoot at it once it got within melee range, which is weird. Something in their defines appears to be shutting them down once enemy is within a certain distance.)

- Yup, Seadra just kill themselves as soon as they try to use Bubblebeam.

- Took a Dormant Veteran Trainer (male chassis.) He just woke up. He's 309 years old out of max age 90. I expect he'll keel over dead next Winter.

About beams, there seems to be a #friendlyimmune tag that avoids friendly fire, seems to work fine to avoid them blowing themselves up.

Tentacruel "special terrain" is because they can be recruited both at swamps and underwater and the game probably has no special message for that.

In my tests poison sting was delivering weak poison. The cloud effect is intended but can be removed.

Now the biggest problem seems to be that Slowed (and confused too now) aren't working properly, but they were so in earlier versions. In particular 020-023 (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showsinglepost.php?p=23956400&postcount=101) when Cerulean City was first added. You can download it and test it out. You don't even need to start a new game, just load a cerulean city game where slowing weapons were used using the 023 .dm file and the game will use the older code when choosing to watch it (that's why there is the bug where the watched battle and the final result can end up different, one is fixed to the turn but the other is run again with whatever rules were changed).

Compared both version's codes and the Slowed/confused codes appear identical.

Thus I strongly suspect it is something else that was added and is conflicting with the weapons coding. But no luck finding out exactly what yet.:smallannoyed:

EDIT: I had changed a bunch of weapon ID numbers around and Slowed ended up after bubbles and bubblebeam, so changed things so that Slowed would have an earlier number, but even then no luck.

[deuterio12]

Version 0.43 (http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=93655452533162671325). Main Changes:
-Fixed tackle being overwrriten by petal dance.
-Fixed the slowed and confusion conditions, turns out the strings had been changed accidentally due to some number replacing I did but since they're pretty long and only a few numbers got changed, I overlooked it.
-Fixed Erika's name typo.
-Gentleman now summons 3 pet pikachus
-Pet pikachu now properly sacred.
-Beam attacks now avoid friendly fire.
-Tentacruel troop can now only be recruited at swamps.
-Veteran trainer pretender chassis now have 1000 year max age.
-Celadon's Cooltrainer now can't roll nature in two her 100% rolls meaning she can get a max of 5 nature even if the stars align right.

Pretender cost is something that should be looked at in more detail but can probably wait a bit. Also agree with Lord_Khaine that the shiny pikachu in particular may be cheap is pretty worthless beyond investing the extra points in scales/ high air magic, and for the later he has only two item slots so not like you can thug/SC them out.

Also about Cerulean maids, I sent a squad of them to directly attack a province and things were weird with roughly half the tentacruels and tentacools advancing and shooting while the other half hanged back. At least until the enemy was routed then everybody charged forward.

As for Beauty X's spawning, they still add to your ukpeep so if you just try to turtle with them money will start to get tight eventually. Also Cerulean City has the fisherman commander who also spawns assorted fish pokemon, did you miss him by chance?

[lord_khaine]

As for Beauty X's spawning, they still add to your ukpeep so if you just try to turtle with them money will start to get tight eventually. Also Cerulean City has the fisherman commander who also spawns assorted fish pokemon, did you miss him by chance?

Yeah.. but thats a luxury problem? i mean if you have to much chaff you just declare war on somebody and throw it at them.
I noticed the fisherman commander, but he caught so many magiccarp it seemed a waste to have him.

[tyckspoon]

I noticed the fisherman commander, but he caught so many magiccarp it seemed a waste to have him.

I recruited a couple first turn while I was bulking out the starting army and just stuck 'em on Patrol in the capital. They make a fair number of Goldeen and some Seel as well. As for the Magikarp.. well, like you said, send 'em out with a commander on Bodyguard and eventually you'll get some 'free' Gyarados. Or they'll die. No great loss.


- Vermilion City: Giving some of the Pikachu variants Storm Power might be appropriate, both thematically and to give their attacks a little more punch - Armor Negating Shock damage is a good place to start, but they're still super low damage and will take a number of hits to actually bring anything down. Thunderers and maybe evolved Raichu?
(Something that's been bothering me about the pokemon project in general - you've been using a lot of variant ranged attacks, which makes sense for what you're trying to represent, but does it actually work? Can a troop use more than one ranged attack at a time? If not then something like the Thunderer is a lot weaker than what you might have wanted, since there's no reason for them not to just use Thunder all the time.)

[deuterio12]

Yeah.. but thats a luxury problem? i mean if you have to much chaff you just declare war on somebody and throw it at them.
I noticed the fisherman commander, but he caught so many magiccarp it seemed a waste to have him.

Well you're gonna need that chaff for the war since you 've been skipping on research by recruiting non-mages.:smalltongue:


I recruited a couple first turn while I was bulking out the starting army and just stuck 'em on Patrol in the capital. They make a fair number of Goldeen and some Seel as well. As for the Magikarp.. well, like you said, send 'em out with a commander on Bodyguard and eventually you'll get some 'free' Gyarados. Or they'll die. No great loss.


- Vermilion City: Giving some of the Pikachu variants Storm Power might be appropriate, both thematically and to give their attacks a little more punch - Armor Negating Shock damage is a good place to start, but they're still super low damage and will take a number of hits to actually bring anything down. Thunderers and maybe evolved Raichu?

Oh, storm power sounds like a lovely idea to spread around Vermillion city indeed, will do!



(Something that's been bothering me about the pokemon project in general - you've been using a lot of variant ranged attacks, which makes sense for what you're trying to represent, but does it actually work? Can a troop use more than one ranged attack at a time? If not then something like the Thunderer is a lot weaker than what you might have wanted, since there's no reason for them not to just use Thunder all the time.)

Yes, a single unit can use multiple ranged weapons.

Exhibit A being MOOSE RIDERS! They have not one but TWO SHORT BOWS! It's one ot the things that made me fall in love with dominions at first sight.

A Larpas is fine too making use all of all three ranged attacks.

There's also the issue of ammo, stronger weapon-moves usually have less.

Fuchsia City basic planning:
-Juggler trainer: basic priest, calls koffing/weezing.
-Ninja Boy trainer: stealthy, assassin, gets grimmer/muk.
-Tamer trainer: strong commander, gets arbok, spawns ekans.
-Lass trainer: basic stealthy spy, gets beedrill.
-Also nidoran male/female (forts) plus evolutions, Zubats (foreign recruit) and golbats (cave) and venonats(foreign) and venomoths (forest)
-Magic is strong death, bit of astral (ghosts, teleporting), nature (lots of poison spells), earth (nidoqueen/king).
-Both Koga and Janine as heroes.
-Not that many poison pokemon in the first game so include ghastly, haunter and gengar. Plus they're as ninja as it gets. Ethereal. Later first ghost gym gets sacred and shiny and other alternate ghost versions besides basic ones like Vermillion City gets lots of pikachu. Ditto for bugs, add weedle/kakuna/beedrill.
-Champions/legendary pokemon: Venomoth(forests), Weezing(fort/city), Muk(swamp), Golbat (cave).

Not very sure who should be sacred here. Koga really loves his venonats/venomoths so maybe those?

Other suggestions welcome of course.

[Aeson]

Don't remember enough about Pokemon to recommend one to be sacred for Fuchsia City, but I'll just say that not every nation needs to have a sacred unit. They're nice to have, especially if they're good enough or available enough to build a strategy around, but you shouldn't feel that you have to give the nation one for the sake of giving the nation a sacred.

[tyckspoon]

Don't remember enough about Pokemon to recommend one to be sacred for Fuchsia City, but I'll just say that not every nation needs to have a sacred unit. They're nice to have, especially if they're good enough or available enough to build a strategy around, but you shouldn't feel that you have to give the nation one for the sake of giving the nation a sacred.

It is kind of weird not to have one in Dominions lore - you usually only see it when the lore of the nation is based on 'Screw the gods we only trust in the might of steel!' (eg, Ulm) Even Mekone, which is directly based on rebellion against the idea of ruling divinities, has their own sacred warriors. It's based on what that nation reveres/looks up to/holds as ideals. For Fuschia.. I'd go with Ekans/Arbok?

[Aeson]

Even Mekone, which is directly based on rebellion against the idea of ruling divinities, has their own sacred warriors.
Mekone has sacred commanders but no sacred troops. Same goes for MA/LA Phlegra, except that Phlegra's sacred commanders are worse 'warrior' chassis than Mekone's due to being human priests rather than giant mage-priests and giant warrior-mages.


you usually only see it when the lore of the nation is based on 'Screw the gods we only trust in the might of steel!' (eg, Ulm)
Normal nations that I can think of that have no recruitable sacred troops:
- EA Yomi
- EA Mekone
- MA Ulm
- MA Phlegra
- MA Shinuyama
- MA R'lyeh
- LA Phlegra
- LA R'lyeh

Of these, only MA Ulm has a 'screw the gods, we only put our faith in our craft' kind of thing going on; EA Mekone, MA Phlegra, and LA Phlegra are more 'we hate the gods and put our faith in our giant strength,' Yomi and Shinuyama presumably lack recruitable sacred units because they're demons (not that that stopped Lanka) and goblins/non-banishable demons, and MA/LA R'lyeh has no obvious reason for a lack of recruitable sacred units other than that they're alien invaders from a crashed spaceship 'fallen star.'

Also, if sacred commanders count as 'sacred warriors,' then MA and LA Phlegra are probably the only normal nations in the game that don't have a recruitable 'sacred warrior,' because their only sacreds are unarmored human H1 priests armed with only a dagger. MA Ulm's priest-smiths are kitted out like and have a stat line fit for a more or less average human warrior, Mekone has sacred giants (including, of course, the very obviously warrior-type Polemarch), Yomi has sacred demon-samurai commanders, and Shinuyama's Bakemono Sorcerers and MA/LA R'lyeh's Starspawn (priest variant) could probably make okay light thugs due to their decent-ish HP and strength, their ability to self-bless, and their access to useful self-buffs, though they'd be quite expensive for it.

[deuterio12]

R'lyeh has a gate at their cap that can call all kinds of sacred otherwordly beings.

Yomi/Shinuyama have cheap/low research national sacred summons in the shikome and tengu.

[lord_khaine]

Not really certain what relevance all of this has. Except i guess as some measuring contest on getting the last word.

I tried playing grass town some more.
They do play uniqely. But im still not certain if their chaff growth is to exponentional or not.

Also think we might want to considder nerfing the arrow fend spell.
This Mod has far more ranget units, and they are far more important.
Casting arrow fend would have a much bigger impact for a pokemon nation.

[tyckspoon]

Celadon's Diamond Beauties also have the thing happening where their summons aren't attacking in assassinations; it's less damaging to them because the poison clouds mean a lot of their victims will end up killing themselves regardless, but still less effective than they should be (especially when that Weepinbell refuses to fire a point-blank Razor Leaf.) Also, I had thought this was cosmetic, but it might be a related symptom - the sprites are facing the wrong way in assassination battles. It doesn't seem to stop them from shooting, but might be related to why they aren't recognizing an enemy in melee distance?



..Celadon Nurse is not poison resistant. Oops.

[Manticoran]

Celadon's Diamond Beauties also have the thing happening where their summons aren't attacking in assassinations; it's less damaging to them because the poison clouds mean a lot of their victims will end up killing themselves regardless, but still less effective than they should be (especially when that Weepinbell refuses to fire a point-blank Razor Leaf.) Also, I had thought this was cosmetic, but it might be a related symptom - the sprites are facing the wrong way in assassination battles. It doesn't seem to stop them from shooting, but might be related to why they aren't recognizing an enemy in melee distance?

Sounds like magic beings without any leadership?

[deuterio12]

I tried playing grass town some more.
They do play uniqely. But im still not certain if their chaff growth is to exponentional or not.

Also think we might want to considder nerfing the arrow fend spell.
This Mod has far more ranget units, and they are far more important.
Casting arrow fend would have a much bigger impact for a pokemon nation.

Another possibility is to add the ability to ignore shields to ranged pokemon weapons, which I believe also ignores air shield. At least most blasting spells seem to have that property and air shield doesn't help any against them. Some more exotic ranged weapons like the storm demon's lighting have ignore shields too in the mod inspector.


Celadon's Diamond Beauties also have the thing happening where their summons aren't attacking in assassinations; it's less damaging to them because the poison clouds mean a lot of their victims will end up killing themselves regardless, but still less effective than they should be (especially when that Weepinbell refuses to fire a point-blank Razor Leaf.) Also, I had thought this was cosmetic, but it might be a related symptom - the sprites are facing the wrong way in assassination battles. It doesn't seem to stop them from shooting, but might be related to why they aren't recognizing an enemy in melee distance?

It reminds me of the guard order behaviour more than anything.

Although something else to take in mind is that only ranged weapons with a special propety can be used at melee range and razor leaf isn't one of them. May run some tests setting some beauty assassinations and adding the ability to leaf in melee when I have the time.

In the other hand as you point out poison aura assassinations already doing a good job just by standing there.

[tyckspoon]

Although something else to take in mind is that only ranged weapons with a special propety can be used at melee range and razor leaf isn't one of them. May run some tests setting some beauty assassinations and adding the ability to leaf in melee when I have the time.


Oh, that's working as intended then - I was thrown off by the relative sizes of the sprites because Weepinbell is like five times the size of Bellsprouts, but by actual unit sizes they were all in the same square and engaged in melee combat (1 Size 2 Weepinbell and 3 Size 1 Bellsprout.)

[deuterio12]

So I was testing pokemon ranged weapons against Airshield and found something interesting.

Area ranged attacks automatically bypass airshield.

With that in mind I believe there's no need to nerf arrow fend since there's quite a few mons with area ranged attacks.

[lord_khaine]

Area ranged attacks automatically bypass airshield.

Its certainly now a reason to wait and see the result of some games first.

[deuterio12]

In that case:

Anybody interested in a small test game with the pokemon mod please raise your hand. Also state your nation preference between Pewter, Cerulean, Vermillion and Celadon City. If there's conflict of interest we can randomize it. I have no particular preference personally.

If only lord_khaine is interested, then I'll go look for more interest in other places (or we can do a first 1x1).

[tyckspoon]

In that case:

Anybody interested in a small test game with the pokemon mod please raise your hand. Also state your nation preference between Pewter, Cerulean, Vermillion and Celadon City. If there's conflict of interest we can randomize it. I have no particular preference personally.

If only lord_khaine is interested, then I'll go look for more interest in other places (or we can do a first 1x1).

Sure, although I'll be on a trip this weekend and won't be able to guarantee time until next week.

- bug report: Geodude Team spell is summoning Gravelers, which means sufficiently powerful Earth casters (and Pewter has no shortage of them) can basically skellyspam Gravelers. Which is kind of hilarious, but certainly not the intended power level for that spell and lack of gem use. Might want to do a review on all your pokesummon spells and rituals and make sure they're actually summoning the intended unit.

[deuterio12]

Ouch, good catch. And indeed there were a bunch of other miscoded summons, hoping I got them all.

Will give a couple more reviews before uploading a cleaner version to be used for the test game.

And no problem waiting until next week to get the game started, although again feel free to call dibs in a specific nation.

[Glimbur]

Just to complicate things, I'm finally ready with a beta version of the pokemon mod I was working on. For clarity's sake, let's call it EA Johto. I have thoughts for MA and LA but they will be a while. Goal is to have it fit power-wise somewhere in with vanilla nations.

Link: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1mR9ABB7HHVwApXO1sflIj9GVnRTX0YD2

There are several things I'm especially curious for feedback on

- Mewtwo might be too cheap
- Expansion in general is hard, maybe some pokemon are better at it than others.
- Is the magic too random? I haven't tried to get any usable spells in my short tests.

I suspect it will not play nicely with the pokemon gyms, identical unit names and such. So, here's a beta test. What do you think? Here's the design document (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BdkY30HE0fkzOcG2xP-uRRA5Cd0LHR-PBWMlnebT_1o/edit?usp=sharing), you can comment there or in the thread or wherever.

[lord_khaine]

I will try and give it a look when i can find the time.
Normally when i test something i run though 14-16 months a couple times to see where that leaves me.
Say if you want feedback on more than that.

[deuterio12]

I suspect it will not play nicely with the pokemon gyms, identical unit names and such.

If you let me know what range of weapon/monster ID numbers you want to reserve for your mod, I'm willing to make sure they don't overlap on my side to make both mods compatible.

[lord_khaine]

If you let me know what range of weapon/monster ID numbers you want to reserve for your mod, I'm willing to make sure they don't overlap on my side to make both mods compatible.

I dont think they are at the moment?
Yours are way above the average nation level. His seems a little beneath it.


There are several things I'm especially curious for feedback on

- Mewtwo might be too cheap
- Expansion in general is hard, maybe some pokemon are better at it than others.
- Is the magic too random? I haven't tried to get any usable spells in my short tests.

I suspect it will not play nicely with the pokemon gyms, identical unit names and such. So, here's a beta test. What do you think? Here's the design document, you can comment there or in the thread or wherever.

First Impression.

-Mewtwo is insanely overpriced as far as i can see. Its priced like an expanding monster. But only has 30 hp.
-A shame the nurse isnt a true healer. Like in the other mod.
-The Ranger HQ/Gym buildings are a interstingly unique idea.
-Its a little disapointing to get a hero who just turns out to be an upkeep free commander.
-I like that the evolution requirement is just 20 xp.
-its kinda critical that evolving just makes the pokemon larger without giving it more HP. As such i almost think it might make them weaker since their attack density fall drastically.
-Dratini seems like a waste of gems. Even their first evolution looks like something that will get beaten by a heavy infantryman.
-a lot of the stats are low. Like a S3 unit with just 12 str? (evolved squirtle)
-I had a group of Wartotles get beaten in melee by wolf tribe archers. Ill just leave that bit here..
-Minor spelling error on Charmeleon flavor text
-An error occured when i attacked some horse archers with an army of Bulbasaurs, dragonairs and Ivysaurs. It crashed the game when i watched the battle.
-The pokemon in general are being shredded by arrows, since they are low prot, low hp, and lack shields.

The Evolutions are a good idea. But they are far, far to weak. A size 4 Blastoise has just 15? hp, and will likely still lose to an indie heavy knight.
And yes its possible to train a regular squirtle up to that point with the gym. But the oppotunity cost is to big, since it means your army has to sit still for 6-7 turns.

[Glimbur]

I wanted there to be a tension between sitting to train and expanding, and it sounds like I hit that. But I hear you on the pokemon in general being too weak, especially for their gold cost. More HP and more stats, for sure. I have also thought about a stronger starting army, but I think it would be better to buff the base pokemon.

I'm most worried about the charmander line. Bulbasaur has entangling and then projectiles, squirtle has some protection, pikachu has attack density, geodude has protection top and maybe deserves more specials like mountain survival and a siege/defense bonus. Rattatta is chaff. Dratini is supposed to be anti-protection but is maybe too weak. But charmander? Best he gets is fire and eventuallu flying.

I'll try nudging some numbers upward and seeing how that goes. Archers are a real problem but I do not know how to fix it and stay true to the theme.

[lord_khaine]

I wanted there to be a tension between sitting to train and expanding, and it sounds like I hit that.

No i think you undervalue the time you spend doing nothing instead of expanding?
I might considder waiting to train if it took 1 round. Any more and i would get to far behind on the expansion curve.
So as it is the isnt any tension. The upgrade is barely worth 1 turns expansion.

You might want to consider putting the gym further up on the research tree.
And as i mentioned before, giving the nurse healer. Else the pokemon who evolve are to cripped to be of use.
The rack up afflictions like crazy due to low HP and Low Prot.
Actually you might want to give them all affliction resistance. After all. Pokemon just faint :smalltongue:


I'm most worried about the charmander line. Bulbasaur has entangling and then projectiles, squirtle has some protection, pikachu has attack density, geodude has protection top and maybe deserves more specials like mountain survival and a siege/defense bonus. Rattatta is chaff. Dratini is supposed to be anti-protection but is maybe too weak. But charmander? Best he gets is fire and eventuallu flying.

Give Geodude rock throw? Or perhaps slashing/piercing resistance? then they can screen against indie archers. Though their low move does suck. Perhaps increase that a lot when they evolve.
And maybe give evolved Pikachu a ranged attack? it seems weird how thunderbolt is a melee skill.
charmander meanwhile, yeah its to squishy. It will explode upon contact with indie infantry.

[deuterio12]

I dont think they are at the moment?
Yours are way above the average nation level. His seems a little beneath it.


Well then exactly how much is "way above" so I can go increase the cost of everything to balance the mod? After all stuff like giants gets to have big stats in return for big price costs.

So how much higher gold costs would you think would make things fairer? 20%? 50%? Twice as costly?

[Glimbur]

No, your unit numbers are way above the normal numbers people pick. Which will help with compatability. Might have to rename some units.

[deuterio12]

No, your unit numbers are way above the normal numbers people pick. Which will help with compatability. Might have to rename some units.

The names are not a problem as long as you're calling the monsters and weapon by their normal ID numbers. There can be multiple monsters with the same name as long as they have different IDs (like there's multiple "crossbowman" with different armors, same name, different number IDs and stats).

That's why I asked what ID numbers you want to use for your mod to make sure they don't overlap. It doesn't matter what the monsters are called if the ID numbers end up overlaping, then compatibility issues happen.

For example, the pokemon mod currently uses weapon froms #800 to #872, and monsters from #6279 to #6500. So what ranges do you want to reserve for your mod?

[lord_khaine]

Well then exactly how much is "way above" so I can go increase the cost of everything to balance the mod? After all stuff like giants gets to have big stats in return for big price costs.

So how much higher gold costs would you think would make things fairer? 20%? 50%? Twice as costly?

Hmm.. thats a difficult question. I will need to think a bit over it.
At the moment i think your nations are more or less balanced against one another.
But likely the troops would need at least a 20-30 point increase to balance them against other nations.
The commanders seems balanced enough.

[deuterio12]

Hmm.. thats a difficult question. I will need to think a bit over it.
At the moment i think your nations are more or less balanced against one another.
But likely the troops would need at least a 20-30 point increase to balance them against other nations.
The commanders seems balanced enough.

Yay for autocalc! Shame it doesn't seem to work for troops... (it seems to always give them a 0 GP cost).

Well will start preparing a version with 30% increased gold/recruitment costs for troops rounded up as necessary and check how it plays out. At least I hope you meant 30 percent, because +20-30 full gold cost just sounds like way too much in particular the numerous size 1 pokemon that actually have mostly stats inferior to normal humies.


https://i.imgsafe.org/09/0912f93d93.png


Now as you can see the geodudes got their asses kicked in the end but took down almost half the maidens so they put up a fight. Since Steel maidens are somewhat resource intensive and are already considered pretty top tier for troops, a 30% price increase for the Geodude sounds justified.

[lord_khaine]

Trying the other mod did also show me something was possible that i were not aware off.
Namely that you can create sites with spells.
Would it be a idea to limit some of the elite pokemon to created sites that can only be cast at special terrain?

But yeah. A 30% increase might be relevant. At it is, for a large part the pokemon nations just works on spamming out large amount of troops and flooding the world with Pikachu.
Also though, the pokemon gym building Glimburs mod has could be a good way to handle that late game its almost impossible for troops to survive long enough to evolve.
(might also need to increase magickarp price though)

And Glimbur.
You might want to considder placing a Pokemon hospital with healer effect in the magic site creation spells?

[deuterio12]

But yeah. A 30% increase might be relevant. At it is, for a large part the pokemon nations just works on spamming out large amount of troops and flooding the world with Pikachu.

Will do.

Also something interesting I discovered, seems like at a certain price range (seems like 30+), gold costs must be multiples of 5 or the game will round automatically to the nearest, althoigh recruitment points can be whatever.



Trying the other mod did also show me something was possible that i were not aware off.
Namely that you can create sites with spells.
Would it be a idea to limit some of the elite pokemon to created sites that can only be cast at special terrain?

Well it would be quite a bit of extra work but may be indeed interesting for the most elite pokemon.

Any specific suggestions? Onyx mine at mountains? Gyarados pool at swamps?



Also though, the pokemon gym building Glimburs mod has could be a good way to handle that late game its almost impossible for troops to survive long enough to evolve.
(might also need to increase magickarp price though)


I was ware that it's possible to create sites through spells, but also that demands coding events and I wasn't very sure how to do it. Still Glimbur's mode provides a quite nice simple template so I finally got it to work, thanks Glimbur!

Also changing the exp granted by the site can be easily changed, so why not make multiple tiers of gyms at different tiers of magic?

Probably gonna put them in construction too since well, they're basically mundane sites.

Like Construction 1-lesser gym for 2 exp per turn for 2 gems.
Construction 3-advanced gym for 4 exp per turn for 4 gems.
Construction 5-greater gym for 8 exp per turn for 8 gems
Construction 7-master gym for 16 exp per turn for 16 gems.
Construction 9-ultimate gym for 32 exp per turn for 32 gems.

[lord_khaine]

Well it would be quite a bit of extra work but may be indeed interesting for the most elite pokemon.

Any specific suggestions? Onyx mine at mountains? Gyarados pool at swamps?

Yeah it was something along that line i were thinking about.
If you put a recruitment limit on them. As well as demanded both special terrain like swamp, cave or waste, and a site spell.
Then it could balance out if those pokemon are both sacred and especially nasty.
In that case you might want to remove magic carp from the recruitable pokemon though.
Else it becomes to easy to abuse training sites.

With those larger Pokemon like Onyx and Gyrados. Then you could instead considder making a Feral (undisciplined) version that turns trained at like 10 xp or so?


Also changing the exp granted by the site can be easily changed, so why not make multiple tiers of gyms at different tiers of magic?

Probably gonna put them in construction too since well, they're basically mundane sites.

Like Construction 1-lesser gym for 2 exp per turn for 2 gems.
Construction 3-advanced gym for 4 exp per turn for 4 gems.
Construction 5-greater gym for 8 exp per turn for 8 gems
Construction 7-master gym for 16 exp per turn for 16 gems.
Construction 9-ultimate gym for 32 exp per turn for 32 gems.

Ah yes that does sound like an excellent idea.
Would also give more reason to research construction.

[deuterio12]

Yeah it was something along that line i were thinking about.
If you put a recruitment limit on them. As well as demanded both special terrain like swamp, cave or waste, and a site spell.
Then it could balance out if those pokemon are both sacred and especially nasty.


Hmmm, thing is only the Larpas and Onyx are sacred. Should the Gyarados be too?

Also perhaps the shiny pokemon champions could be tied to such sites as well. The mid-tier stuff can probably remain recruitable normally.



In that case you might want to remove magic carp from the recruitable pokemon though.
Else it becomes to easy to abuse training sites.

Or I could pump magicarp promotion exp higher again. 100 Suddenly seems a lot more doable with an 8 exp gym.



With those larger Pokemon like Onyx and Gyrados. Then you could instead considder making a Feral (undisciplined) version that turns trained at like 10 xp or so?


Well by that standard one could also make "low level" and "high level" versions with progressively higher stats and better attacks, but that's probably a bit too much work and complication when there's still a lot of other nations to do.



Ah yes that does sound like an excellent idea.
Would also give more reason to research construction.

Nice!

[lord_khaine]

Hmmm, thing is only the Larpas and Onyx are sacred. Should the Gyarados be too?

Also perhaps the shiny pokemon champions could be tied to such sites as well. The mid-tier stuff can probably remain recruitable normally.

You mean the pokemons who can use magic?
Yeah it would make things more if they were viable.
Im just still not certain if they are worth their price or not.
For a lot of them their paths are not suited for actual combat.
And they also lack the slots to be useful thugs or super combatants.


Or I could pump magicarp promotion exp higher again. 100 Suddenly seems a lot more doable with an 8 exp gym.

Yes it does. Or set it at.. 50? and then just place a recruitment limit on magic carp?

[deuterio12]

You mean the pokemons who can use magic?
Yeah it would make things more if they were viable.
Im just still not certain if they are worth their price or not.
For a lot of them their paths are not suited for actual combat.
And they also lack the slots to be useful thugs or super combatants.


How so? High earth and air can both be pretty brutal in combat. High water isn't too shabby either, and the best if actually fighting underwater. High nature isn't as much of a killer app, but still has some good spammable spells.

Or if making them demand a ritual site I guess I could remove the ritualist/item forging penalty.



Yes it does. Or set it at.. 50? and then just place a recruitment limit on magic carp?

Thing is magikarps are supposed to be pretty common.

One thing I noticed is that there's a desertion command that makes monsters have a percentile chance to just go away every month.

So maybe besides 50 exp for promotion give them something like 20% chance to desert each month? Representing trainers getting bored and just eating releasing them.

[deuterio12]

Pokemon 0.44 (http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=00786298089620117796) up, increased cost of troops roughly by 30% accross the board, fixed some bugs, most electric pokemons now have storm power, added the option to build training sites of several degrees, magikarps need 50 exp to evolve and have 20% chance to desert per turn.

Ritual sites for extra recruiting not implemented yet since I need to think a bit about how best to do those, like cost and research level.

Would it be too much if, say, each granted 1 gem income, considering they would only be buildable on certain types of terrain? Another thing that would be flavourful is boosting ritual range for the nation's element. Other things can be easily implemented are granting a discount to rituals of certain schools of magic, changing scales, changing unrest and bringing gold. Maybe just vary it a bit between sites?

[lord_khaine]

magikarps need 50 exp to evolve and have 20% chance to desert per turn

Thats a quite novel idea of preventing large buildup of magiccarps.
And it also means you would need at least the master gym to train them.
Since during the 6 turns it takes to do so, then about 75% of them would desert.


Would it be too much if, say, each granted 1 gem income, considering they would only be buildable on certain types of terrain? Another thing that would be flavourful is boosting ritual range for the nation's element. Other things can be easily implemented are granting a discount to rituals of certain schools of magic, changing scales, changing unrest and bringing gold. Maybe just vary it a bit between sites?

It does sound like a pretty interesting idea.
I dont think it would unbalance things. Especially not if you reserved them for the 3 rare terrain types.

[deuterio12]

Thats a quite novel idea of preventing large buildup of magiccarps.
And it also means you would need at least the master gym to train them.
Since during the 6 turns it takes to do so, then about 75% of them would desert.


You could also just throw a lot of magikarps and throw them at a lower level gym, some should be bound to last the whole training. Actually considering that units gain 1 exp automatically, 9 exp would take 5 turns. And that's roughly 1/3 chance of each magikarp lasting.



It does sound like a pretty interesting idea.
I dont think it would unbalance things. Especially not if you reserved them for the 3 rare terrain types.

So here's version 0.45 (http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=63236284451964695992) with the new site summoning spells. The pokemon recruiting ones are all at Thaumathurgy 5 for each nation. Penalty to rituals and crafting from pokemon champions was also removed.

Also since tyckspoon still seems to be in his trip, how about that 1x1 initial test game between actual human players?

[tyckspoon]

Also since tyckspoon still seems to be in his trip, how about that 1x1 initial test game between actual human players?

Got back Monday, still game to help with live test. Just let me know how you want to try to organize it.

[deuterio12]

Got back Monday, still game to help with live test. Just let me know how you want to try to organize it.

Great! Since it seems like we only have 3 people here, we can either go for a 3 player game, or I can go post a thread in the official dominions 5 steam forums since there seems to be quite a fair bit of activity over there and they're also open to mods. Do you have a preference for either?

In the case of steam forums, I would say it should be fine to leave the door open to anybody wanting to play a vanilla nation along the pokemon ones (ever dreamed of stabbing pikachus?). Heck, if 2 other people show up wanting to play one of the pokemon nations, I would be fine playing a vanilla one myself.

[Glimbur]

Dominions 5 is on sale at 40% off until July 9th on Steam. Not a bad time to try it or buy it for a friend.

[lord_khaine]

Its a perfect time for doing so, for everyone who likes strategy games.
The game is rather complex. But easy to start with.

[Glimbur]

EA Johto 0.6 is out. (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Z_FI003YXnn8m64KGPdWJxHKBYuGBit4/view?usp=sharing)

Previous version of EA Johto was underpowered. I wonder if I went too far the other direction with this one. I'm particularly concerned about the power of the Geodude line, and if Gary Oak is usable and at a reasonable cost.

[lord_khaine]

Ill get back to you after close review.
What nation should they be compared to?

[Glimbur]

Ideally they will be somewhere in the vanilla balance for EA. Looking for better than EA Tien Chi but maybe not as good as... uh...someone overpowered in EA.

[tyckspoon]

Ideally they will be somewhere in the vanilla balance for EA. Looking for better than EA Tien Chi but maybe not as good as... uh...someone overpowered in EA.

Pangea and all the Elf and Giant nations (aside from Mekone, I think, and even they have some pretty decent and obvious strengths you can lean into - part of being bad is just how obvious those strengths are and how easy it is to set up a counter) are considered strong in EA, IIRC.

[lord_khaine]

new patch

-Alright MewTwo is a viable expander now.
And with the center having a chance to heal its afflictions its a little less troublesome that he lacks regeneration or rejuvenation.
-Pikachu is still to squishy to use in combat.
-Graveler is reliable now.
-Raichu might be a little op.
-spelling error on Charizard promotion event
-Charizard ranger missing text
-Dragoniar still has headbutt
- tier 3 pokemon is perhaps a touch nasty in the numbers you can build them


edit.
Further thoughs

Its perhaps a little to hard to balance tier 3 pokemon to both be meaningful and interesting.
Without also running into situations like when a full army of venomsuar and raichu munched first a throne army and then a rival nation army without casulties.

The Pikachu/Raichu line of units could be made meaningful by perhaps slowing rate of fire to 1/2.
As well as by capping damage at 5 on pikachu.
As well as limiting recruitment on them somehow.
In return you could then also give Pikachu a ranged thunder attack.

As for the tier 3 pokemon.
Perhaps limit promotional evolution at stage 2?
That should be much easier to balance the units.

But it was awesome when some of the tier 3 suddenly became commanders.
It was perhaps again a little OP as i suddenly found myself with a small army of flying F3 mages.
So you might want to limit that to 1/turn.
Or create a spell that evolve a tier 2 pokemon into its tier 3 commander shape?

[Glimbur]

Mewtwo deserves some affliction resistance since all pokemon get it now. Probably 2 or 3.

Tier 3 pokemon are supposed to be good, but it sounds like they are too good. Maybe I should have the tier 2 evolve into tier 2+ and the only way to get tier 3 is as pokemon rangers. That naturally limits them a lot, could work. Another thought is to make the tier 1 and 2 weaker, but that feels unsatisfying. I can also play with the XP levels, I had doubled the XP gain of pokemon gyms for this release and also made geodude line take more XP to evolve.

I am ok with pikachu dying a lot as long as they are also pretty killy. I think I will make raichu melee again, sounds like ranged lightning is just too good.

I also want a variety of build options to work, and with bless strat being non-viable that means maybe more pretender options. Could add a more conventional monster expander (Gyrados?) And maybe a titan too, though the baseline eastern pantheon has some titans already.

[lord_khaine]

Tier 3 pokemon are supposed to be good, but it sounds like they are too good. Maybe I should have the tier 2 evolve into tier 2+ and the only way to get tier 3 is as pokemon rangers. That naturally limits them a lot, could work. Another thought is to make the tier 1 and 2 weaker, but that feels unsatisfying. I can also play with the XP levels, I had doubled the XP gain of pokemon gyms for this release and also made geodude line take more XP to evolve.


I do think the most satisfying option is to limit the number of tier 3 somehow.
Instead of making them weaker. But you might still want to look at changing their item slots.
As i recall they all had full slots.


I am ok with pikachu dying a lot as long as they are also pretty killy. I think I will make raichu melee again, sounds like ranged lightning is just too good.

You could look into making it work like javlings.
2-3 shots at low range. With a damage cap of some sort.


I also want a variety of build options to work, and with bless strat being non-viable that means maybe more pretender options. Could add a more conventional monster expander (Gyrados?) And maybe a titan too, though the baseline eastern pantheon has some titans already.

Well MewTwo is a pretty effective Astral expander after just a bit of gear.
Though other than that it seems like its hard to come up with that many different builds.
Its either full scales or monster expander.

[Glimbur]

I made Tier 3 Pokemon much rarer by requiring Rangers to evolve them. And fixed a few other things. Not sure when I'll have time for another iteration but here it is (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dG1cTC8elNGfjg5G05_4iONDlw4Vo7BY/view?usp=sharing).

Still to do: different sprites for veteran pokemon, maybe add surfing pikachu, proofread and make nation description more standars format, balance attempts.

[deuterio12]

Well real life happened and didn't manage to get that test game going, but been updating the mod bit by bit.

Pokemon mod 0.60 ready (http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=04211789945965364120), with both Fuschia (poison) and Cinnabar (fire) cities added.


-Great veterans pretenders now have airshield 100% since otherwise the combat AI always prioritized targeting them first and took them out pretty fast.
-Great veteran retinues expanded.
-Added shield and heavy pikachu to Vermillion City.
-Added Starmie Rider and Starmie Rider commander to Cerulean city.



https://i.imgsafe.org/89/89c3aac56f.png
https://i.imgsafe.org/89/89c3663203.png
https://i.imgsafe.org/89/89dd592c42.png
https://i.imgsafe.org/89/89c32ec218.png


Will give another try at getting a MP test game going in the near future, in particular since now there's a fire nation to round things up.

[lord_khaine]

Oh god thats hilarious :)
I will try and look into giving both of those nations a quick playthough, to see if there are any glaring issues they suffer from.

[deuterio12]

Great to hear that, thanks a lot!:smallbiggrin:

[lord_khaine]

Fuchiba initial impression

*Giant Soul Badge. Seems a little pricy. Main purpose is likely just to provide a D/N Bless?
*Cant really see the purpose of legendary Arbok.
*Rain mages who can actually expand. Pretty shocking!

*Arbok Is this unit not meant to be sacred?
*Nidorans seems fairly effective expanders due to ranged AP attack.
*Weedle uses ranged web; Thats super effective. Perhaps to effective?
*grimer is perhaps just a touch to squishy. Maybe give it piercing/slash resistance and a few more hp.
*Remain skeptical of Koffings. A single one dying to poison damage chain detonated an entire expansion group.Perhaps they are more useable in war than expansion.
*Zubat is actually useful when paired with Weedle. But it does not fly?

*Poke Kindergarden does work. Can upgrade a batch of Pokemon before the end of year 1 if you focus on it.

[deuterio12]

Fuchiba initial impression

*Giant Soul Badge. Seems a little pricy. Main purpose is likely just to provide a D/N Bless?
*Cant really see the purpose of legendary Arbok.
*Rain mages who can actually expand. Pretty shocking!

*Arbok Is this unit not meant to be sacred?
*Nidorans seems fairly effective expanders due to ranged AP attack.
*Weedle uses ranged web; Thats super effective. Perhaps to effective?
*grimer is perhaps just a touch to squishy. Maybe give it piercing/slash resistance and a few more hp.
*Remain skeptical of Koffings. A single one dying to poison damage chain detonated an entire expansion group.Perhaps they are more useable in war than expansion.
*Zubat is actually useful when paired with Weedle. But it does not fly?

*Poke Kindergarden does work. Can upgrade a batch of Pokemon before the end of year 1 if you focus on it.


-Will reduce the price of the giant soul badge to 180 like the other giant badges.
-Not sure which "rain mages" you are refering to but seems like they're ok so yay!
-Hmm, I see your point, the autocalc gives it a much higher price. Heal+Fear is nice for an awake expander monster, but at 170 points is probably just too expensive. Will lower to 100.
-Ups, forgot the #holy tag in that one, fixed.
-So which one do you think would be better to nerf string shot, a) single target, b)less range, c)less ammo, d)less acuraccy, e)combination of previous?
-Will add piercing/slash resistance and increase HP by 3 to grimmer as you suggest.
-Yes, koffings are meant to be a more exotic tactical option-
-Ups, typo in the flying tag for that one, will fix too.
-Nice that Poke Kindergarden is a viable strategy.

Thanks a lot again!

[lord_khaine]

Your very welcome. Will look at the fire nation a little later.
And with rain mage i meant rainbow mage.
Kinda funny its the dom1 who are possible expanders.
While the dom2 monsters are mostly good for magic stuff.

And still not certain what role it will fill at 100 point either.
Well i guess perhaps provide cheap D magic. But it need something else, like Awe, to expand.

Else, as for string shot then im not entirely certain.
It seems at least partly important since the nation dont have a solid front line.
Perhaps start by simply making it single target.

[deuterio12]

Isn't one of the basis of pokémon that a veteran trainer can just waltz in a region and tear through most opposition they meet with their own team of pokémon?:smalltongue:

Version 0.61 (http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=01140768991844648783)


-Giant Soul Badge cost changed to 180.
-Added Awe 2 to Legendary Arbok and cost changed to 100.
-String Shot single target now.
-Normal Arbok is now properly sacred.
-Grimer's HP increased to 14 and gains resistance to slashing and piercing.
-New Shield Grimer with spear and shield but only resistance to piercing, no stealth and can't evolve.
-New Heavy Grimer with spear, shield, helmet and armor, no stealth and can't evolve. Fluffwise this and the shield grimer are more solid than the normal grimer allowing them to use some equipment but at the cost of being more vulnerable and unable to fit in tight spaces to sneak around.
-Zubat flying fixed.
-Fixed some typos here and there.

[lord_khaine]

Isn't one of the basis of pokémon that a veteran trainer can just waltz in a region and tear through most opposition they meet with their own team of pokémon?

Well yeah.. i guess most often they can do so with just1-2 Pokemon and what they catch on the way.
And so once again showing how responsible this is!

Else. Version .61 looks good.
I will try and run a test of it later today.

[lord_khaine]

second impression

*String shot is still aoe 1.
*Legendary Arbok is now a pretty efficient expander. And hilarious with Reanimator.
*Heavy Grimer also a lot more useful.
*Regular Grimer can win battles as well
*Zubat is suddenly a lot more effective when it flies
* Some issues with events. Had Korgar the Gym leader vanish in a puff of smoke, to appear before my city gates.
*Poison Hive doesnt allow for recruiting additional pokemon. Despite being on a fort.
*Same for the other recruitment sites created by spells.

[deuterio12]

-Ok, string shot should be properly single target now.
-Koga was coded as both a normal hero and multihero while being unique, derp, should be fine now. Still interesting to know the game will make him pop at the cap again.
-The recruitment sites should be working now, was using the #homecom/mon command but also cheated in my testing by making them pop right at start but seems like if the site is created later then the #homecom/mon will not recognize the player as the original owner of the site. So as a secondary effect if the province gets taken by somebody else they'll be able to recruit the pokémon as well, but that may create some interesting dynamics.

Pokemon 0.62 (http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=05670681086315783668)

[lord_khaine]

Alright tested the new patch


*Legendary Arbok is perhaps a little to good at expanding now. Perhaps reduce Awe to 1, and smack another 40 point to its price.
*Zubat is also a touch to good now it flies. Easy to mass large groups of rear attackers. Likely bump its price to 10?
*Grimer is also kinda good now. Maybe add 2 gold to all variants? And maybe its more fitting to make it pierce/blunt resistant?
*Weedle is still very good. It can likely use another GP in its cost. As well as perhaps 50% more recruitment cost.
*Bedrill having ranged An attacks feels a little to strong. Perhaps lower it to AP hits?
*All the site creation spells now work.

Besides this then nation looks done, and quite interesting to play.
I like the idea of recruitment sites done though spells. Its adds a new layer of objectives.

[deuterio12]

Nice! Could you take a look at the fire nation city next please?

-Legendary Arbok's Awe reduced to 1 and price bumped to 140.
-Zubat gold cost bumped to 9. It's meant to be cheap cannon fodder option and still a 50% gold cost increase.
-Grimer's gold cost bumped to 16, slash resistance changed to blunt resistance.
-Weedle gold cost bumped to 10, recruitment points increased to 15.
-Pin Missile now armor piercing instead of armor negating.

Pokémon 0.64 (http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=00588408301195774314)

[lord_khaine]

Oh yes of course, i have already glanced at them a little.
And are initially concerned about the def 27 knights.

[deuterio12]

Wait, 27? I'm seeing 21 defense skill for rapidash riders. It's still high, ok, but they're quite expensive with not so good HP and not particularly good armor either.

Also another typo that was pointed out from other people and fixed was that the special site rituals for Cainnabar ended up being death instead of fire, but version 0.64 should have that fixed.

[lord_khaine]

Yeah, but they have Fire power 2, so thats another additional +6 defence as soon as it grows warm.

[Aeson]

Yeah, be careful with the scale power tags - [Scale] Power X gives a bonus of X*[scale value in province] to Strength, Attack, Defense, and Combat Speed, so it can make the unit's power very swingy depending on whether or not it's in favorable scales.

[lord_khaine]

In this case its heat power 2, so it should not be a surprise if a given unit turns into a monster in the nations native H3 domain.

[deuterio12]

Yeah, but it works both ways, get them in a cold province and suddenly they're a lot weaker. It's the Niefelheim/Caelum paradigm, some units get really powerful in the right weather but crumble like wet paper if they find themselves in a province with the opposite temperature. Really good for defense, but not so hot (pun intended) for offense.

Plus there's always ranged attacks which fully ignore defense by default not to menion lowl level spells like earth meld and whatnot.

[lord_khaine]

Initial Cinnabar


*Minor fluff mixup with veteran trainer.
*The site spells require death magic instead of fire.
* Legendary Charizard can indeed expand on its own.
* 5 Rapidash takes out 35 barbarians. No casulties.
*Everything with Fireblast need some sort of nerfing. AOE 3, AP shots are just to good.


And i dont think its nearly as bad as Nieffle/Caelum.
In part because to start with most people take H3 out of habbit.

[deuterio12]

With a neutral nation, it's actually more efficient to take Cold 3 if you're going to dump weather scales, since each match always start in spring and so it'll help keep things fresh during the summer that comes right after, allowing to squeeze a bit extra gold in the critical early game.

But ok the rapidash riders ended too strong so some nerfing is in order:
-Rapidash Rider now has Heat Power 1 instead of 2.
-Rapidash Rider's defense reduced to 18 (19 for commander) in neutral weather.
-Fire Blast reduced to Aoe 1 and has a -3 attack penalty.
-Site paths should be fixed now.
-Fixed Ace trainer typos.

version 0.65 up. (http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=06199960718452015199)

[lord_khaine]

Ill try and press a new test run in.
To see if rappiddash still stomps the opposition like before :)

[tyckspoon]

Legendary Charizard died when I tried to blind expand into a province that turned out to be full of Lamias and also had Howl active as a pre-battle-start spell and was in neutral heat scales (he actually got swarmed under by wolves, which I'm kind of surprised by with the heat aura). Totally worthless, buff plz :smallbiggrin: Put an end to that particular test run pretty fast. Next time I might lean harder into the Air option instead of Fire; Thunder Weapons Fireblasts seems like it could provide some hilarity, or just doing like Farshot and stacking a ton of Precision on your fire-archer lines of Charmanders.

It does seem to me that all the pokemon nations kind of feel very similar with just a different elemental skin on? Like practically everything has a ranged attack and they're mostly in cheap swarms, so the default strategy for almost all nations is just absolutely burying enemies under volume of fire, you really want Wind Guide/Flaming Arrows, and the ones that can do that easily just kind of Pokemon better than the ones that cant?

(At least moderate exceptions, and possibly indications that this is more perception than reality: Pewter has pretty awesome heavy thugs/super combatants/monster forces with Onyx and Golem, both the recruit versions and shiny commanders. Celadon's Kabutops are absolutely terrifying heavy infantry/hellbless sacreds, and are much easier and more reliable to make a focus of strategy now that you can park them in a training site for XP - basically time-delay recruiting from the base Kabuto instead of needing to break underwater and get 1/turn if you're lucky enough to find a province with enough rec points.)

Is it intended/desired that your Pretender be the one casting the special recruit site rituals? If not, you may want to reduce the path requirements; 5 is a pretty high ask for recruitable mages, especially in paths where the boosters themselves are hard to make (Air/Fire suffer worst). If yes, this strongly discourages using immobiles, as you effectively lock yourself out of using these spells and recruiting their associated mon.

[lord_khaine]

Legendary Charizard died when I tried to blind expand into a province that turned out to be full of Lamias and also had Howl active as a pre-battle-start spell and was in neutral heat scales (he actually got swarmed under by wolves, which I'm kind of surprised by with the heat aura). Totally worthless, buff plz Put an end to that particular test run pretty fast. Next time I might lean harder into the Air option instead of Fire; Thunder Weapons Fireblasts seems like it could provide some hilarity, or just doing like Farshot and stacking a ton of Precision on your fire-archer lines of Charmander

Hah.. yeah.. i also lost my Charizard to a heavy cavalry group.
But at the same time it not an earth serpent. You likely should not expand blindly with it.
Of course not certain if it can expand after the fireblast nerf.

Also not certain that Far Shot or Thunder Weapons work on ranged natural attacks?


It does seem to me that all the pokemon nations kind of feel very similar with just a different elemental skin on? Like practically everything has a ranged attack and they're mostly in cheap swarms, so the default strategy for almost all nations is just absolutely burying enemies under volume of fire, you really want Wind Guide/Flaming Arrows, and the ones that can do that easily just kind of Pokemon better than the ones that cant?

Yeah. Its perhaps not entirely removed from the truth either.
I have taken Order 3 on all nations so far. Well and likely you want Arrow fend more than anything else.


Is it intended/desired that your Pretender be the one casting the special recruit site rituals? If not, you may want to reduce the path requirements; 5 is a pretty high ask for recruitable mages, especially in paths where the boosters themselves are hard to make (Air/Fire suffer worst). If yes, this strongly discourages using immobiles, as you effectively lock yourself out of using these spells and recruiting their associated mon.

Well its not impossibly hard?
You need a level 4 mage and a booster. A lot of the nations can random a level 4 mage in their prime element.

[tyckspoon]

Hah.. yeah.. i also lost my Charizard to a heavy cavalry group.
But at the same time it not an earth serpent. You likely should not expand blindly with it.
Of course not certain if it can expand after the fireblast nerf.

Also not certain that Far Shot or Thunder Weapons work on ranged natural attacks?


Charizard should do fine if you give it a couple turns for the Heat scales to spread/start moving in Summer, it would just require waiting a couple turns - that Heat Power would do a lot for its survivability, especially combined with the high Berserk value (and/or go full Fire and take Awe bless, maybe.) Similar to how if you want to expand with a lot of the Titans you'll do best if you wait a couple of turns and make them a basic armor to help fix up their generally kinda crappy Prot. Might be easier to take one of the Great Veterans and let their retinues do the work, tho, at least for softer target provinces. (I had taken Fire Weapons, because the idea of Flaming Fire attacks amused me.)

There's a specific tag that flags a weapon as .. I want to say the term the game uses is 'intrinsic' and disqualifies it from benefiting from those effects. Mind Blast is the most common example of it. Lore-wise the Pokemon ranged attacks are 'natural' weapons, but mechanically I think they're just weapons right now and should benefit from weapon blesses just like bows do.. admittedly I'm not 100% sure on how that interacts with Area effects instead of single-target projectiles.

[lord_khaine]

Charizard should do fine if you give it a couple turns for the Heat scales to spread/start moving in Summer, it would just require waiting a couple turns - that Heat Power would do a lot for its survivability, especially combined with the high Berserk value (and/or go full Fire and take Awe bless, maybe.) Similar to how if you want to expand with a lot of the Titans you'll do best if you wait a couple of turns and make them a basic armor to help fix up their generally kinda crappy Prot. Might be easier to take one of the Great Veterans and let their retinues do the work, tho, at least for softer target provinces. (I had taken Fire Weapons, because the idea of Flaming Fire attacks amused me.)

Charizard can indeed still clear provinces without cavalry, even without any sort of combat bless.
Though Heat Power doesnt really do anything for its survival.
The knights still trashes stuff inside heat dominion.
But otherwise the nation kinda feels screwed against anything with noticeable Fire resistance. Like Abysians or Garnet Amazons.

[deuterio12]

It does seem to me that all the pokemon nations kind of feel very similar with just a different elemental skin on? Like practically everything has a ranged attack and they're mostly in cheap swarms, so the default strategy for almost all nations is just absolutely burying enemies under volume of fire, you really want Wind Guide/Flaming Arrows, and the ones that can do that easily just kind of Pokemon better than the ones that cant?

(At least moderate exceptions, and possibly indications that this is more perception than reality: Pewter has pretty awesome heavy thugs/super combatants/monster forces with Onyx and Golem, both the recruit versions and shiny commanders. Celadon's Kabutops are absolutely terrifying heavy infantry/hellbless sacreds, and are much easier and more reliable to make a focus of strategy now that you can park them in a training site for XP - basically time-delay recruiting from the base Kabuto instead of needing to break underwater and get 1/turn if you're lucky enough to find a province with enough rec points.)

The pokémon nations do all follow a basic structure, but still I did try to add significant differences:

-Pewter City indeed has the hardest stuff around.
-Cerulean has also quite a lot of sailing and amphibious stuff, allowing them to attack from unexpected angles in any map with a decent water presence.
-Vermillion has the whole Stormpower subtheme, also only pokémon nation so far with seducers.
-Celadon has poison auras on most their stuff and eventually mindless tough troops with parasects, plus the biggest commander variety.
-Most of Fuschia's city commanders are stealthy with a good selection of stealthy troops to boot meaning they can actively pursuit a stealth approach.
-Cinnabar is the nation most reliant in their element so far.

Then of course depending on which type of magic you have available would also change your strategies.



Is it intended/desired that your Pretender be the one casting the special recruit site rituals? If not, you may want to reduce the path requirements; 5 is a pretty high ask for recruitable mages, especially in paths where the boosters themselves are hard to make (Air/Fire suffer worst). If yes, this strongly discourages using immobiles, as you effectively lock yourself out of using these spells and recruiting their associated mon.

As lord_khaine pointed out, every nation can reliably reach level 4 in their main magic path through the cap ace mages, and from there you can always forge at least one booster to reach level 5 (earth boots for Pewter City lv 2, both ring of water lv 1 and sea robe lv 3 for Cerulean, winged helmet needs lv 4 for Vermillion, thistle mage lv 2 for Celadona nd Fusciha fire helmet also lv 4 for Cinnabar). You'll need to research construction, but you were probably planning to do it anyway. Or you can take a pretender with it and research rush the sites.



Yeah. Its perhaps not entirely removed from the truth either.
I have taken Order 3 on all nations so far. Well and likely you want Arrow fend more than anything else.

Well Order 3 is already a pretty popular option.


Charizard should do fine if you give it a couple turns for the Heat scales to spread/start moving in Summer, it would just require waiting a couple turns - that Heat Power would do a lot for its survivability, especially combined with the high Berserk value (and/or go full Fire and take Awe bless, maybe.) Similar to how if you want to expand with a lot of the Titans you'll do best if you wait a couple of turns and make them a basic armor to help fix up their generally kinda crappy Prot. Might be easier to take one of the Great Veterans and let their retinues do the work, tho, at least for softer target provinces. (I had taken Fire Weapons, because the idea of Flaming Fire attacks amused me.)

There's a specific tag that flags a weapon as .. I want to say the term the game uses is 'intrinsic' and disqualifies it from benefiting from those effects. Mind Blast is the most common example of it. Lore-wise the Pokemon ranged attacks are 'natural' weapons, but mechanically I think they're just weapons right now and should benefit from weapon blesses just like bows do.. admittedly I'm not 100% sure on how that interacts with Area effects instead of single-target projectiles.

All pokémon weapons have the #bonus tag. The basic function is prevent multi-weapon fighting penalties. I believe they benefit from blesses just fine, but didn't really remember to test it yet.


Charizard can indeed still clear provinces without cavalry, even without any sort of combat bless.
Though Heat Power doesnt really do anything for its survival.
The knights still trashes stuff inside heat dominion.
But otherwise the nation kinda feels screwed against anything with noticeable Fire resistance. Like Abysians or Garnet Amazons.

Sooo, bigger price tag for the rapidash riders? 100 gold? 120?

As for fire resistance, welp sadly Gen 1 fire pokémon aren't really known for their variety. That's why I added the scientists so they can fall back on communions should the enemy start spamming fire resistance spells.

Still an idea I had just now, how aboult a second charmander-charmeleon-charizard line, "war charmander", not sacred, no fire anything besides fire resistance, and instead just hit hard with Scratch/Slash/Fury Swipes plus neutral dragon rage along slightly better base stats. Fluffwise they contain their heat to power up physically. Maybe even do a third armored line. How does that sound?

[tyckspoon]

Loaded up Vermilion for a look.

- Magneton Emperor is a quite effective expander.
- I forgot he's weak to fire. Trying to take on an AI Cinnabar expansion army with him was.. a poor decision (he got bogged down trying to trample Rapidash that he couldn't really hit because of their high defense, and then passed out burning and bleeding to death from heat auras. Oops.)
- Which reminds me, AI may actually be able to use pokemon halfway effectively, because in this particular case recruiting just swarms of whatever is cheapest actually is a somewhat reasonable play.

- The Pikachu corps is quite effective. Thundershock as a 'use in melee' weapon may be more effective than intended - my combat logs for it don't show it rolling to hit, so it kind of looks like anybody in contact with a Pikachu is just getting auto-smacked with an Armor Negating, potentially stunning shot (which is pretty much what you'd expect for a point-blank ranged attack with how those work in Dominions. It's kind of like having Thunder Weapons on them, except the damage isn't capped.) Combine with the raw numbers of Pikachu you can generate or the increased durability of Heavy Pikachu and getting entangled with these guys is almost certainly going to come out worse for your troops, particularly if you can't match the attack density of a square full of 6 chus. Have not tried to make much use of Runners or Fliers yet, they don't seem too well suited to expansion (could probably mix in a few Runners on the traditional flank-and-attack-rear plan, tho.)

- Magnemites are looking kind of awesome as crowd-control fire support, with both Thundershock and a super high precision disable with Supersonic. Put a line of these behind your Heavy Pikachu or let them fire a couple turns before letting Lucha pikas loose to dismantle your enemies. I honestly almost think evolving them is a downgrade when they lose Supersonic, although much like with the Pikachus getting a point-blank Tri Attack in the face is going to be quite painful. Good prot, but having next to no HP is going to make them quite likely to die and/or get afflicted into nothing when they do come into melee.

[deuterio12]

Loaded up Vermilion for a look.

- Magneton Emperor is a quite effective expander.
- I forgot he's weak to fire. Trying to take on an AI Cinnabar expansion army with him was.. a poor decision (he got bogged down trying to trample Rapidash that he couldn't really hit because of their high defense, and then passed out burning and bleeding to death from heat auras. Oops.)
- Which reminds me, AI may actually be able to use pokemon halfway effectively, because in this particular case recruiting just swarms of whatever is cheapest actually is a somewhat reasonable play.

I'll take that as a compliment.:smalltongue:




- The Pikachu corps is quite effective. Thundershock as a 'use in melee' weapon may be more effective than intended - my combat logs for it don't show it rolling to hit, so it kind of looks like anybody in contact with a Pikachu is just getting auto-smacked with an Armor Negating, potentially stunning shot (which is pretty much what you'd expect for a point-blank ranged attack with how those work in Dominions. It's kind of like having Thunder Weapons on them, except the damage isn't capped.) Combine with the raw numbers of Pikachu you can generate or the increased durability of Heavy Pikachu and getting entangled with these guys is almost certainly going to come out worse for your troops, particularly if you can't match the attack density of a square full of 6 chus. Have not tried to make much use of Runners or Fliers yet, they don't seem too well suited to expansion (could probably mix in a few Runners on the traditional flank-and-attack-rear plan, tho.)

Yeah, the fliers and runners are meant as more specialized troops for specific scenarios.

Made the thunder attacks range 050 which means they have a 50% chance of being used in melee instead of all the time.

As for rolling to hit, I believe that's because it's still considered a ranged attack and those rolls usually don't show up. Plus at point-blank, it's basically impossible to miss.




- Magnemites are looking kind of awesome as crowd-control fire support, with both Thundershock and a super high precision disable with Supersonic. Put a line of these behind your Heavy Pikachu or let them fire a couple turns before letting Lucha pikas loose to dismantle your enemies. I honestly almost think evolving them is a downgrade when they lose Supersonic, although much like with the Pikachus getting a point-blank Tri Attack in the face is going to be quite painful. Good prot, but having next to no HP is going to make them quite likely to die and/or get afflicted into nothing when they do come into melee.

Added supersonic to the Magnetons too.

Version 0.66 up (http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=09077069219374118533)


-Thunder attacks changed from being useable all the time in melee to only 50% chance of being useable in melee.
-All Magnetons have supersonic now.
-Added Duel Charizard, Duel Charmeleon (cap only) and Duel Charizard (cap only, limited to 2/month) to Cinnabar city, all of those lose all fire-related abilities besides fire protection and are no longer sacred but get a neutral 10 range armor negating Dragon Rage attack that only deals 4 damage (no added Str) plus slightly better base stats and aren't coldblooded. Meant as a tool against fire-resistant enemies.
-Rapidash Riders got a 50% gold increase. That leaves the basic Rapidash Rider at 105 gold, which is just 10 gold cheaper than a Morvarc'h Knight, which are sacred and have a bunch of extra abilities and can sail to boot.

[lord_khaine]

Looked at version .66

*I like the new Duel line. It helps a lot that the nation has something that can fight in the cold.
*Rappiddash knights still trash indies. But at least they are expensive now.
*Not certain if Double Kick is perhaps a little OP. 2 str 13 AP hits becomes straight up disgusting with fire power.
*Not certain if Charizard is a bit to expensive to be worth using. Yes its a flying blender. But its also fragile. Kinda dislike Fire Power values above 1 on anything besides gods.
*Its kinda a shame that Charizard Champion is mostly useable as a flying spellcaster. Its just not survivable.
Even its main defensive buff, mistform, kinda becomes trash when fighting other pokemon nations.
*Ninetails also seems a little pricy.

I have also been thinking about the general balance of the pokemon nations.
And how they were mean to measure up with regular nations.
At the moment their attack density is insane.
But i was wondering if giving them all bad formation fighter across the board would solve that.

[deuterio12]

-Nice that the duel line is liked!
-All Fire Power reduced to 1 to make things less swingy.
-If possible I want to avoid Cinnabar City just becoming "charizard spam: the nation", so it's intended that you can't just break a solid enemy formation with just them. Plus a flying fire/air caster has merit on its own. Still a few charizards that can properly trash things would be nice, so added a national item, Charizard Charcoal, that adds +10 HP, Ironskin, +5 Def, +5 MR for 10 fire gems at Construction 2 and can only be equiped by Charizards. For the record, it's indeed possible to make custom items that only a select units can equip, so there's a lot of potential there.
-Ninetales cost reduced to 60 HP/recruitment.
-Added Bad Formation Fighter (aka -1) to all pokémon except the god versions, it's an interesting idea that also matches the fluff.
-Between pokémon having bad formation and reduced fire power, double kick should be nerfed indirectly, so hopefully it should be finer now.

Thanks once more!

Pokemon 0.67 (http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=05969350587116075051)

[lord_khaine]

If possible I want to avoid Cinnabar City just becoming "charizard spam: the nation", so it's intended that you can't just break a solid enemy formation with just them. Plus a flying fire/air caster has merit on its own. Still a few charizards that can properly trash things would be nice, so added a national item, Charizard Charcoal, that adds +10 HP, Ironskin, +5 Def, +5 MR for 10 fire gems at Construction 2 and can only be equiped by Charizards. For the record, it's indeed possible to make custom items that only a select units can equip, so there's a lot of potential there.

Yeah the potential is staggering there.
Its of course a lot of work to add national items like this.
But if for example shiny pokemon were given a head slot, and perhaps 1-2 more misc slots.
Then they could be turned into light SC's in a balanced fashion.
Maybe make the con 2 item just give Stoneskin?
And then create a con 4 ironscale version? Maybe make it cursed, and represent hammering shards of fire/earth gems into every single scale to harden them?
Make the HP/reinvigoration item a seperate slot? Charizard gym weights.

Else. I will try and take a look at Pewter city again.
And see how they measure up with bad formation fighter to balance their attack density.

[deuterio12]

-Ok, expanded pokémon item slots accross the board to 1 head, 3 misc.
-Charizard Charcoal now just adds Stoneskin and +3 MR, cursed, cost reduced to 5 gems. Mega Charizard Charcoal at Con 4 grants IronSkin and +5 MR for 10 gems. Fluffs updated. Added Charizard Berry for +HP and Def, including Mega version with bigger bonus for more gems and higher research level, also cursed. Couldn't get a proper pic for training weights.

Pokemon 0.68 (http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=07560404013456613127)

Let me know how Petwer City goes after all these updates!

[lord_khaine]

Hmm.. the problem is then of course. That you cant upgrade from the stoneskin to the ironskin version.
Perhaps its only the final version that should stick. Ill try and think about that some more.

Pewter

Is perhaps a little to effective at crushing indies.
Expansion were 19 provinces without an awake expander.
And while testing different types of pokemon.

-Maybe Rhyhorn rider shouldnt have pierce/slash resistance. In return they could get another couple hp. And a 10 gold discount.
-try and cut a point of prot from geodude? and a single hp.
- maybe change Rhyhorn to just crush resistance? it seems more like a rino than a rock monster. Perhaps cut it 5 gold
-Kabuto and Omanyte meanwhile seems kinda useless. Maybe a 5-10 gold discount on them?
- is it intentional that the site spells both require highlands instead of mountains?

[deuterio12]

-Reduced Geodude HP and protection by 1.
-Rhyhorn loses slash and pierce resistance and gains blunt resistance, -5 costs.
-Rhyhorn rider loses both resistances and gains +2 HP, -10 costs.
-Kabuto and Omanyte discounted 10 gold each.
-About highlands, theyr're technically using the mountain code. I believe it's more than what we used to know as mountains in Dominions 4 are called highlands in Dominions 5. There's still border mountains and seemingly "normal" mountains, but thing is, those aren't generated in a random map, they need to be manually added in, and are more rare overall, so that's why I left it as using highlands for now. There is code for border mountains (which can be combined with highlands), but not code for "normal" mountains it seems.

Pokemon 0.681 (http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=04456062409797932884)

[lord_khaine]

Ill try and find time to test if Pewter still steamroll things with these changes.
In the previous try, a sufficiently large group of Rhyhorn did more or less kill all sorts of things without attrition.

Perhaps the evolved Rhyhorn will also need some sort of buff.
I just recall it having some sort of obscene damage output from first glance.
Oh yes it has 3 attacks, 25+ damage with a possible +4 berserker.
Where the horn alone can get another +10, for something along the line of 30 piercing damage.

And at the same time Rhydon is super tough, with 24 prot after they berserk.
I think initially the horn charge is to mean. If they are reduced to 2 attacks, berserker drops to 2,
and they get the Rhyhorn defensive changes. Then they actually still compare favorably with unblessed anakites.
In part from having 5 more defence. Thats about the same as a Sheshai Anakite with Barkskin.

[tyckspoon]

Question about the poke-training buildings- can you have more than one in a fort, if they're of different tiers? Will casting another one just over-write the earlier one? Wondering if you can upgrade as you get the research, or if, say, you're stuck with a Kindergarten in your capital if you put one up early to help kickstart production of evolved mon.

[lord_khaine]

You can just cast the newer one.
It seems to just take the highest training site. But im 100 % certain.
But do look forward to someone elses input on Pewter and Charizard Town.

[tyckspoon]

-Reduced Geodude HP and protection by 1.
-Rhyhorn loses slash and pierce resistance and gains blunt resistance, -5 costs.
-Rhyhorn rider loses both resistances and gains +2 HP, -10 costs.
-Kabuto and Omanyte discounted 10 gold each.
-About highlands, theyr're technically using the mountain code. I believe it's more than what we used to know as mountains in Dominions 4 are called highlands in Dominions 5. There's still border mountains and seemingly "normal" mountains, but thing is, those aren't generated in a random map, they need to be manually added in, and are more rare overall, so that's why I left it as using highlands for now. There is code for border mountains (which can be combined with highlands), but not code for "normal" mountains it seems.

I might bring Kabuto cost back up just a bit; Kabuto itself is mediocre at best, but Kabutops are pretty nuts and just recruiting tons of Kabuto and parking them in a training center is a very cost (but not time.. although compared to needing to break into underwater, build a fort, and recruit probably 1/turn there if you can get a place with enough recruit points, it's still competitive) efficient means of getting them. Consider if you could, say, recruit a regular Jaguar and if you kept it alive for five turns it turns into an Ozelotl (Mictlan jaguar-bat demon summons.) What would you consider a fair cost for those demon seeds?

[lord_khaine]

Alright, thats of course true.
I newer got a UW fort build in my first test game, because i ended it after discovering that there wasnt any highlands in the area.
Only mountains and caves.

And you do of course need to park them a bit longer. But i get your point. Perhaps they are an investment into breaking into UW.
Tried the new patch. Things look much more reasonable now. And will likely be further balanced by human opponents being able to pick out blunt weapons to hurt the rock pokemon.
Still not entirely certain how balanced the option of pokemon schooling a bunch of gravelers into stage 2 is though.
Its strong. Just hard to estimate how strong.
Or for that matter how effective the site creation spells are.

[deuterio12]

Ill try and find time to test if Pewter still steamroll things with these changes.
In the previous try, a sufficiently large group of Rhyhorn did more or less kill all sorts of things without attrition.

Perhaps the evolved Rhyhorn will also need some sort of buff.
I just recall it having some sort of obscene damage output from first glance.
Oh yes it has 3 attacks, 25+ damage with a possible +4 berserker.
Where the horn alone can get another +10, for something along the line of 30 piercing damage.

And at the same time Rhydon is super tough, with 24 prot after they berserk.
I think initially the horn charge is to mean. If they are reduced to 2 attacks, berserker drops to 2,
and they get the Rhyhorn defensive changes. Then they actually still compare favorably with unblessed anakites.
In part from having 5 more defence. Thats about the same as a Sheshai Anakite with Barkskin.

I think the problem with the rhyhorn and rhydon is more tat they're a bit too tough. Dropped their protection and Berseker a bit and now they seem to suffer significant attrition.


Question about the poke-training buildings- can you have more than one in a fort, if they're of different tiers? Will casting another one just over-write the earlier one? Wondering if you can upgrade as you get the research, or if, say, you're stuck with a Kindergarten in your capital if you put one up early to help kickstart production of evolved mon.

Yes, you can have multiple training sites in the same province as long as they're different ones.


I might bring Kabuto cost back up just a bit; Kabuto itself is mediocre at best, but Kabutops are pretty nuts and just recruiting tons of Kabuto and parking them in a training center is a very cost (but not time.. although compared to needing to break into underwater, build a fort, and recruit probably 1/turn there if you can get a place with enough recruit points, it's still competitive) efficient means of getting them. Consider if you could, say, recruit a regular Jaguar and if you kept it alive for five turns it turns into an Ozelotl (Mictlan jaguar-bat demon summons.) What would you consider a fair cost for those demon seeds?

Bumped up Kabuto's cost a bit.


Alright, thats of course true.
I newer got a UW fort build in my first test game, because i ended it after discovering that there wasnt any highlands in the area.
Only mountains and caves.


About that, seems like the border mountains code allows for "normal" mountains after all.

Changes:
-Rhyhorn protection reduced to 16 from 18, berserk 2 to berserk 1.
-Rhydon protection reduced to 17 from 20, berserk 4 to berserk 2.
-Rhyhorn riders berserk dropped from 2 to 1.
-Graveler protection dropped from 18 to 16, Golem protection from 20 to 17 (champion from 22 to 19).
-Kabuto's cost bumped a bit to 25 gold.
-Sites that required highlands can now be cast in all mountains too.

Pokemon 0.682 up (http://s000.tinyupload.com/?file_id=22260515115461048163)

[lord_khaine]

I think the problem with the rhyhorn and rhydon is more tat they're a bit too tough. Dropped their protection and Berseker a bit and now they seem to suffer significant attrition.


I still cant help but think that when something hits harder than a angry Anakite on its charge, then perhaps its offensive potential should be considered a little closer.

edit.
I also though of a custom item for Onyx/Golem.
Lave Blood Argumentation. cursed, and gives fire shield. Likely con 4 as the shield. 5 fire/10 earth.
In case it should be possible to thug golems. I tried a bit. But its kinda hard to make them killy enough.

[deuterio12]

I still cant help but think that when something hits harder than a angry Anakite on its charge, then perhaps its offensive potential should be considered a little closer.


Anakite:
22 Str
13 attack
Dawn Sword (+1 attack, 9 base damage, magic)
Gore (-1 attack, 0 base damage)

So the Anakim attack is +14 sword 31 damage magic and +12 gore for 20 damage

Rhydon:
21(23) Str
10(12) attack
(Berserk 2)
Horn Attack (3 base damage)
Stomp (4 base damage)
Horn Drill (5 base damage)

The Rhydon in turn is either +10 horn attack 24 damage, +10 stomp 25 damage and +10 Horn Drill 26 damage.
Or if berserk, +12 for 24 damage, +12 for 27 damage and +12 for 28 damage.

Now at first glance yes the Rhydon appears to be hitting harder. However the Anakim:
-Has better acuraccy with his sword even compared to the Berserk Rhydon. A single good sword slash at +14 that actually hits and evades a shield block is better than three hits at +10 missing or being softened by shields (even basic ones reduce damage by a whooping 16). Even if the Rhydon gets Berserk, it's still only at +12 which is nice but still lower than the average 14 defense of shield troops.
-The sword is magic, always handy against any surprise etherealness or mistform.
-The Anakim himself isn't considered a great unit just for his great offense, but also for great durability. He has 53 HP vs the Rhydon's 34, 14 MR against the Rhydon's 12, 16 defense with shield vs the Rhydon's 7 defense (5 while Berserk). Only in base protection does the Rhydon pulls ahead by 1 point while berserk.

Then there's also the critical point: You can recruit Anakims from turn 1. You can't recruit Rhydons starting from turn 1. You'll need to spend gems and research for setting up training places or the direct summoning rituals. So I would say it's not really fair to compare an unit that can be pumped out all game long against an unit that demands setup before you can unleash them.



I also though of a custom item for Onyx/Golem.
Lave Blood Argumentation. cursed, and gives fire shield. Likely con 4 as the shield. 5 fire/10 earth.
In case it should be possible to thug golems. I tried a bit. But its kinda hard to make them killy enough.

Hmmm, that sounds like a good idea, will work on it.

[lord_khaine]

Then there's also the critical point: You can recruit Anakims from turn 1. You can't recruit Rhydons starting from turn 1. You'll need to spend gems and research for setting up training places or the direct summoning rituals. So I would say it's not really fair to compare an unit that can be pumped out all game long against an unit that demands setup before you can unleash them.

Well.. in return Anakims are cap only.
And can be argumented further by a bless. But alright what unit are Rhydorns means to be compared to instead?
Heavy cavalry? Could you run a test of for example.. 1200 gold of Rhydorns against 1200 gold of heavy knights.
Or 1200 gold of lets say.. Chud Warriors? If both groups doesnt get crushed, then ill agree that Rhydorns are likely fine.

Though on the subject of graveler. Then i think they grow a little to OP with their new AOE rock attack
They are to easily massed up.


Hmmm, that sounds like a good idea, will work on it.

And thank you. I mostly tried doing a little golem thug testing.
And found that even with a hard skin/heat aura bless, they lose to deer tribe warriors and barbarians.
They could of course get to replace their healm slot with boots. But i fear being able to trample stuff would make them to op.

Well.. perhaps thats an idea for another Golem-only (and expensive) item? Death Ball data disk. Teachers your Golem to Roll over people.
Perhaps some of the stronger pokemon attacks would be granted by items? That would lock them behind a research gate.

[deuterio12]

Well.. in return Anakims are cap only.
And can be argumented further by a bless. But alright what unit are Rhydorns means to be compared to instead?
Heavy cavalry? Could you run a test of for example.. 1200 gold of Rhydorns against 1200 gold of heavy knights.
Or 1200 gold of lets say.. Chud Warriors? If both groups doesnt get crushed, then ill agree that Rhydorns are likely fine.


Coded me some free summoning spells, can't forget to remove them for the next release. Now chuds cost 20 gold and Rhydons cost 180, so that's roughly 60 chuds vs 6.7 rhydorns, let's round it up to 7.

https://i.imgsafe.org/6f/6f2b47023e.png

The chuds tanked the massed Rhydon charge like bosses and procceeded to kill them good. One of them actually bled to death, I think that's why it's not scored as a kill for the chuds.

And now for the knights, 1200 budget allows for 20 of those.

https://i.imgsafe.org/6f/6f5a77ab03.png

Now they got their asses beaten, but more because of their crappy morale and fighting in enemy dominion so they ended up breaking a bit too fast, and still took out 4 rhydons and weakened a fifth enough for the warrior chief to finish it off. I would say quite a noble performance all in all.



Though on the subject of graveler. Then i think they grow a little to OP with their new AOE rock attack
They are to easily massed up.

Fair enough, removed it.



And thank you. I mostly tried doing a little golem thug testing.
And found that even with a hard skin/heat aura bless, they lose to deer tribe warriors and barbarians.
They could of course get to replace their healm slot with boots. But i fear being able to trample stuff would make them to op.

Well.. perhaps thats an idea for another Golem-only (and expensive) item? Death Ball data disk. Teachers your Golem to Roll over people.
Perhaps some of the stronger pokemon attacks would be granted by items? That would lock them behind a research gate.

Now that you mention it, I had been wondering about TM items that grant new attacks. And Rollout is a classic rock move.

Earthquake item for rock's pokemon?:smallamused:

[lord_khaine]

Coded me some free summoning spells, can't forget to remove them for the next release. Now chuds cost 20 gold and Rhydons cost 180, so that's roughly 60 chuds vs 6.7 rhydorns, let's round it up to 7.

The chuds tanked the massed Rhydon charge like bosses and procceeded to kill them good. One of them actually bled to death, I think that's why it's not scored as a kill for the chuds.

And now for the knights, 1200 budget allows for 20 of those.

Now they got their asses beaten, but more because of their crappy morale and fighting in enemy dominion so they ended up breaking a bit too fast, and still took out 4 rhydons and weakened a fifth enough for the warrior chief to finish it off. I would say quite a noble performance all in all.


Alright im convinced. They are nasty but not unbeatable. Even at the favorable Rhydon price.


Now that you mention it, I had been wondering about TM items that grant new attacks. And Rollout is a classic rock move.

Earthquake item for rock's pokemon?

Earthquake is like the one move thats better left for them to cast as a spell?
Like Golems cant spam it like its going out of style.

But perhaps TM's should be head slot?
That way a Pokemon cant stack attacks.

Because i were also thinking Golems needed some sort of.. Earth Brand Style attack.
Something hitting a square for either 10 AP Blunt, or 18-19 Blunt.
Normally it has the problem that its defence gets harrashed down, and then suddenly everyone can repel its attacks.
But a Con 4 item would let it handle that by the time regular thugs get AOE attacks.

[tyckspoon]

Well.. in return Anakims are cap only.
And can be argumented further by a bless. But alright what unit are Rhydorns means to be compared to instead?
Heavy cavalry? Could you run a test of for example.. 1200 gold of Rhydorns against 1200 gold of heavy knights.
Or 1200 gold of lets say.. Chud Warriors? If both groups doesnt get crushed, then ill agree that Rhydorns are likely fine.


Rhyhorn are pretty clear heavy cavalry comparisons, especially now that their prot is a lot closer to (and lower than some) standard cavalry (and I suspect 1200 gold worth of Rhyhorn would have completely crushed the Chud Warrior comparison, which is kind of what you expect when you put a sufficient mass of tramplers up against size 2 units, and may well have lost against heavy cav.) Rhydon are kind of a weird comparison to use as gold cost, because generally speaking you aren't recruiting them for gold. You're recruiting them with gems, mage turns, and invested research, or you're recruiting and raising Rhyhorn, in which case you're paying for it in time.. although time spent with useful troops on the way, which makes that less of a hardship than babying a lot of the other first stage pokemon around until they evolve.

Edit: Oh, and adding negative formation fighter to all the Pokemon means they're now distinctly on the wrong side of attack density - at only one to a square Rhyhorn/Rhydon will be extremely vulnerable to being surrounded and chopped down by raw weight of attacks, and with lower prot it doesn't take super high quality attacks to do it. Being a trampler actually worsens this a bit, because it means they will actively shove into the middle of a formation they can't hope to kill in time and actively end up surrounding themselves.

Also for some reason I never looked at the gold value of Rhydon before? Those things are gonna crush your economy to have around in mass - you're looking at a mage worth of upkeep per unit for a troop. A nice heavy troop, sure, but still just a troop.

[deuterio12]

Earthquake is like the one move thats better left for them to cast as a spell?
Like Golems cant spam it like its going out of style.

But perhaps TM's should be head slot?
That way a Pokemon cant stack attacks.

Because i were also thinking Golems needed some sort of.. Earth Brand Style attack.
Something hitting a square for either 10 AP Blunt, or 18-19 Blunt.
Normally it has the problem that its defence gets harrashed down, and then suddenly everyone can repel its attacks.
But a Con 4 item would let it handle that by the time regular thugs get AOE attacks.

I tried to make the TM head slot, but for some reason it didn't work, wouldn't even show up in-game, but changing it to a misc item works so gonna roll with that for now.

The Fire Shield item had to be done in two, one for Onyx and the other for Golem since the Rollout is only for the Golem and each monster can only have one unique identifier for items it turns out.

Pokemon 0.683 (http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=95601295353811388760)


Rhyhorn are pretty clear heavy cavalry comparisons, especially now that their prot is a lot closer to (and lower than some) standard cavalry (and I suspect 1200 gold worth of Rhyhorn would have completely crushed the Chud Warrior comparison, which is kind of what you expect when you put a sufficient mass of tramplers up against size 2 units, and may well have lost against heavy cav.) Rhydon are kind of a weird comparison to use as gold cost, because generally speaking you aren't recruiting them for gold. You're recruiting them with gems, mage turns, and invested research, or you're recruiting and raising Rhyhorn, in which case you're paying for it in time.. although time spent with useful troops on the way, which makes that less of a hardship than babying a lot of the other first stage pokemon around until they evolve.


About 1200 gold worth of chuds vs 1200 gold worth of rhyhorns
https://i.imgsafe.org/72/7211e3c2b6.png
STONE FOR THE STONE GOD!




Edit: Oh, and adding negative formation fighter to all the Pokemon means they're now distinctly on the wrong side of attack density - at only one to a square Rhyhorn/Rhydon will be extremely vulnerable to being surrounded and chopped down by raw weight of attacks, and with lower prot it doesn't take super high quality attacks to do it. Being a trampler actually worsens this a bit, because it means they will actively shove into the middle of a formation they can't hope to kill in time and actively end up surrounding themselves.

Hmmm, actually the kinda opposite happened in that test battle, the rhyhorns somehow kinda managed to hold a line while breaking up the chud's front and isolating several of them, but ended up being poked to death anyway.



Also for some reason I never looked at the gold value of Rhydon before? Those things are gonna crush your economy to have around in mass - you're looking at a mage worth of upkeep per unit for a troop. A nice heavy troop, sure, but still just a troop.

For the record, all evolved pokémon have significantly higher gold costs. That way you can't just sit forever training more up, or it'll start eating in your income pretty hard.

[lord_khaine]

I tried to make the TM head slot, but for some reason it didn't work, wouldn't even show up in-game, but changing it to a misc item works so gonna roll with that for now.

The Fire Shield item had to be done in two, one for Onyx and the other for Golem since the Rollout is only for the Golem and each monster can only have one unique identifier for items it turns out.

Alright with that i think Pewter City is in a good place.

Ill turn back to Cerulean city next go.
Though to start with im a little doubtful about both the Blasttoise Pretender and leader.
The pretender is priced as a expanding monster. But i cant really see it clearing provinces as it is.
It died to Wolf Tribe Barbarians.

[deuterio12]

Alright with that i think Pewter City is in a good place.

Great!



Ill turn back to Cerulean city next go.
Though to start with im a little doubtful about both the Blasttoise Pretender and leader.
The pretender is priced as a expanding monster. But i cant really see it clearing provinces as it is.
It died to Wolf Tribe Barbarians.

Hmmm, pumped base stats a bit, reduced price to 140, replaced an Hydro Pump with a Bubble Beam, and made them both useable 50% of the time in melee.

With some testing of my own, the Legendary Blastoise can now reliably take out basic infantry provinces, small groups may actually rout before they can even reach melee. Heavy cavalry groups are still dangerous, and big enough barbarian groups will tear the legendary blastoise pretty fast if they can close in (in one of the test battles ran into a whooping 83 strong barbarian horde, legendary blastoise managed to take out some 31 before being turned into turtle soup).

Pokemon 0.684 (http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=01593331215083767783)

Also tweaked the legendary pokemon sprites a bit, as well as finally giving recolored unique jr/cool/veteran/nurse trainer sprites to Fuschia and Cinnabar teams.

[lord_khaine]

Hmmm, pumped base stats a bit, reduced price to 140, replaced an Hydro Pump with a Bubble Beam, and made them both useable 50% of the time in melee.

With some testing of my own, the Legendary Blastoise can now reliably take out basic infantry provinces, small groups may actually rout before they can even reach melee. Heavy cavalry groups are still dangerous, and big enough barbarian groups will tear the legendary blastoise pretty fast if they can close in (in one of the test battles ran into a whooping 83 strong barbarian horde, legendary blastoise managed to take out some 31 before being turned into turtle soup).

Pokemon 0.684

Also tweaked the legendary pokemon sprites a bit, as well as finally giving recolored unique jr/cool/veteran/nurse trainer sprites to Fuschia and Cinnabar teams.

Sounds good.
At its price it should just have a chance of defeating selected provinces, not be able to safely roll over heavy cavalry.
I will try and think about what TM or special gear might be fitting for it.

As well as look closer at the rest of the nation again.
I am still doubtful about what sort of bless they are meant to go with.

edit.

I tried to make the TM head slot, but for some reason it didn't work, wouldn't even show up in-game, but changing it to a misc item works so gonna roll with that for now.

The horned helm adds an attack.
What makes that different?

[deuterio12]

Sounds good.
At its price it should just have a chance of defeating selected provinces, not be able to safely roll over heavy cavalry.
I will try and think about what TM or special gear might be fitting for it.

As well as look closer at the rest of the nation again.
I am still doubtful about what sort of bless they are meant to go with.

I prefer the freezing aura for bless myself.



The horned helm adds an attack.
What makes that different?

...Nevermind, was just making a really stupid mistake, works as a helmet just fine after all. Impressive how different things can look after a good night of sleep.

[lord_khaine]

I prefer the freezing aura for bless myself.

I tried freezing aura and twist of fate.
But the pokemon seemed to squishy to really draw advantage of it.


...Nevermind, was just making a really stupid mistake, works as a helmet just fine after all. Impressive how different things can look after a good night of sleep.

Well perfect then.
I do think it draws a little more into the spirit of things if they cant stack attacks.
Got any thoughs for Blastoise bonus moves?
Maybe a melee cold AOE splash?
Or a ranged AP/piercing water cutting beam that isnt cold damage?

[deuterio12]

I tried freezing aura and twist of fate.
But the pokemon seemed to squishy to really draw advantage of it.

Checking my games, seems like I go full water and add some +Defense. Squirtles and Staryu both have 12 base Defense so even a +2 significantly increases their durability in melee against average troops. I could also pump up their defense a bit further.



Well perfect then.
I do think it draws a little more into the spirit of things if they cant stack attacks.
Got any thoughs for Blastoise bonus moves? []
Maybe a melee cold AOE splash?


https://i.imgsafe.org/96/961ef0bc41.png


Or a ranged AP/piercing water cutting beam that isnt cold damage?
https://i.imgsafe.org/96/961eef23ff.png

You'll notice I have added a few extra benefits since just an attack feels a bit limited, in particular for a cursed item that only one kind of pokémon can equip. The flying in TM91 is both a callback to Blasty, Green's Blastoise from the Adventures manga that "flies" by using its cannons as propulsion, and in-game allows to have an affordable flying thug.

[lord_khaine]

Checking my games, seems like I go full water and add some +Defense. Squirtles and Staryu both have 12 base Defense so even a +2 significantly increases their durability in melee against average troops. I could also pump up their defense a bit further.

Seems like a possible option.
I will try and give it a chance.



You'll notice I have added a few extra benefits since just an attack feels a bit limited, in particular for a cursed item that only one kind of pokémon can equip. The flying in TM91 is both a callback to Blasty, Green's Blastoise from the Adventures manga that "flies" by using its cannons as propulsion, and in-game allows to have an affordable flying thug

Yeah that was precisely the sort of item i had in mind.
I will come back when i have had a chance to test it further.

[deuterio12]

It may help if I actually upload the version with the new Blastoise TMs. Pokemon 0.685 (http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=07629349922822469386)