NationGen for Dominions 4 Thread - Dominions 4: Thrones of Ascension

I actually bothered to write code to get it to a barely releasable state! This thread will probably get less updates than the one at dom3mods, but I figured it's worth posting here anyway.

UnitGen was originally written for Dominions 3. It's a program that generates nations from scratch and draws it's own sprites that aren't too awful either since they're built from Dominions sprite parts. Only in UnitGen you can experience procedurally generated awesomeness such as hoburgs riding cave men, bear cavalry or mechanical mosquito cavalry. Hoburgs are kinda slapstick race. There are also funky shapeshifts that make sense more or less, like mages turning to ghosts for the remainder of the battle when they die so they can keep casting.

So, what it lacks compared to Dominions 3 version:
- Races (only 4 now, 6 races ported, but YOU can port them fairly easily! I'll try to port one per semi-major release, but I'm lazy even if it's fairly quick thing to port them.)
- Descriptions
- Special abilities for anything except sacreds and elites
- Super monsters

What it adds compared to Dominions 3 version:
- Pretty pointless graphical interface
- A few very minor content changes I did without releasing back in the day
- Actually works with Dominions 4 changes
- Beautiful new flags (though not that much content so they might be slightly repetetive. Feel free to help with that.)

It's still a bit bad. Feel free to report horrible balance problems (small ones I don't care about) that definitely exist. Also if you see a crash, please report the seed so I can actually debug it.

EDIT:
Get it from here:
Koti.kapsi.fi

Edited by: elmokki

Thanks. Having the catalog of sprite parts is valuable in and of itself.

For the purposes of the Mod Compilation thread, would you prefer this under the new nations category or the modding tools category?

I would guess it's more of a new nation than a modding tool since utilizing it for making other mods isn't that simple.

New version. Mages and priests get special abilities + pile of tweaks and fixes.

Koti.kapsi.fi

- The UI allows setting custom seed and mod name
- Mod name is randomized (or set to nation name if there's just one nation) if it isn't specifically set
- Epithets! Slightly better system than in Dominions 3 version, but still just eyecandy of ourse.
- #shapechange shouldn't crash the program anymore
- Autocalc is not used anymore for pricing, but mage prices should be similar to autocalc ones thanks to new pricing algorithm that essentially is autocalc's magic part.
- Chaos recruitment allows using % of unit price (before slow rec and sacred modifiers, though, for now.)
- Certain things can increase or decrease unit prices percentually if made to do so (ie multipliers as skill arguments are fine)
- ...and obviously tons of small tweaks and fixes

This is hilarious fun.

I think I had it generate a race of Abyssian's with Skeleton riding Abyssians and another race of Hoburgs led by death mages.

Yeah. I generated 10 nations and here's a quick showcase of one. It's not the most interesting one, but hey, maybe it shows what at least one nation out of ten usually is. I'll just link to pictures:

This is Ommia. Ommia is a nation of hoburgs who, however, do have a some useful human allies/slaves/you name what: Koti.kapsi.fi

Ommia is led by it's mage order of... Fathers of Ommia I guess? There are two schools inside this mage order, the lava fathers and the feral fathers: Koti.kapsi.fi Koti.kapsi.fi

I would guess the lava fathers are a more martial school, since Ommia has a sacred called Molten Templar. Molten Templar is a hoburg with surprisingly beefy stats, awe, a giant mechanical mosquito as a mount and a battle axe. Sadly they're a bit expensive and have low protection. Koti.kapsi.fi

Ommia is luckily not limited to the sacred mosquito cavalry hoburgs. They have a variety of other awesome options such as:
Goat cavalry: Koti.kapsi.fi
Full plate human dude with a big wooden club: Koti.kapsi.fi

This is just awsome awsomness
Well done Sir!

Looks like fun!

*Amazing*. Really wish there were some proto-descriptions but otherwise, looking at that nation above it sounds like it would be really cool to play. Hoburgs riding giant mechanical mosquitos...and goat cavalry? Just wow

David88 wrote: *Amazing*. Really wish there were some proto-descriptions but otherwise, looking at that nation above it sounds like it would be really cool to play. Hoburgs riding giant mechanical mosquitos...and goat cavalry? Just wow

Dominions 3 version had descriptions for nations and units. However they did not really include much story. Sacreds and mages got some pretty generic stuff, but that's all.

I do kind of want to make it generate some sort of histories for the nations as well, but that's not really a high priority. Ideally I'd make the nations generated in each batch have some sort of shared history, but that has some issues with seeds (ie I want a specific number combination to generate the same nation every time) if I make it do it so that it affects nation generation. It's possible to implement separately from seeds though since it doesn't affect gameplay, so I'd say it's likely there's that at some point.

On actually high priority is adding various gameplay-affecting features the Dom3 version had that I feel like were nice (at the very least these include Caelian race, stuff such as elephants and hydras and random nation level features such as blood sacrifice or cheaper temples) and minor stuff such as all sacreds not being available for each fort. In addition I'm interested in adding some Dominions 4 features, mostly making some units sometimes recruitable outside forts. I also don't have all of the new modding features utilized yet even if some of the new moddable unit abilities for example are fairly trivial to add in.

Balancing is also something that should be high priority, but to do that I need the correct kind of data. What kind of units/sacred systematically cost too much/not enough? What kind of mage setups are far too powerful or far too weak? Stuff like that.

I also think the changes I did to special ability generation made the probability settings in content files related to those obsolete, so I should probably look at those as well.

Oh, yeah, by the way, if you get the newest version (0.0.5-v2) you should be able to generate Ommia by generating 2 or more nations with the seed -1661391466. Eventually I'll add interface support to generate just that nation, but it's the second nation whenever you generate a batch of nations with that seed.

19:09 < Elmokki> Koti.kapsi.fi
19:09 < Elmokki> minor update
19:09 < Elmokki> sacreds can be cap only instead of always being available at every fort
19:10 < Elmokki> nations get special commands once in a while (which sometimes is as boring as one point of temperature scales)
19:10 < Elmokki> nations get summaries
19:10 < Elmokki> bonus mages get extra abilities
19:10 < Elmokki> mages/sacreds/priests in general tend to have a higher probability of something really cool if they're supposed to get something powerfulIn other news: I'd love if someone made more flag parts (really easy) or some demonbred units for Abysia (more effort)!

Edited by: elmokki

Generated some nations, really fun stuff and some really look enticing to play (especially the ones with hoburgs riding mecha-bugs or cave people) but I think there's some issues, especially with naming:

- Scout is used for recruitable troops - slightly confusing as scouts are usually commanders. I've definetely seen a 'Holy scout' troop that was holy but not actually a scout(no stealth!)
- Paladin is used for troops and commanders - but the units I've seen with it are NOT sacred
- Site-naming should perhaps have a closer tie to gemgen(or the reverse), I got a 'City of Virgin Slaves'capital site that DID give a blood recruitable(it was a blood nation)but no blood slave income, looks odd
- Deciever -> Deceiver
- Heavy/plate armored infantry with clubs looks a bit odd to me.
- Lots of redundancy in naming, though that's sometimes fun. Like 'Holy/Numinous Divinity'.

other than that, great work, and as I suggested in chat eventually being able to get randomgen pretenders(especially titans)would be cool.

0.0.7 is out.
Some of the changes:
- Mage/priest naming algorithm should generate a bit fewer Cardinals of Divine Divinities and such.
- Mage naming algorithm should consider differences in paths more when trying to name sets of more than one primary mage.
- Mage naming algorithm should prefer high level paths over low level paths when naming (unless it is trying to find the difference between two mages)
- Sacred/mage naming gave names that needed commands if any unit on the nation had those commands due to a persisting mistake in a file (command vs personalcommand)
- Site names rely more on gem output than mage paths
- Some races like some magic paths more than the others and thus get them more often.
- External description files are back. Check options tab!
- Fixed a bug that caused #name "" on some magic weapons, making Dom4 unable to run the mod
- Custom items are able to get their special looks again (though it's quite rare seeing how only few weapon types of human size races happen to have a special look for a few specific magic effects)
- A few flag graphics from Flypaper- Demonbred graphics for Abysians from Flypaper made into demonbreds for Abysians. They're rare. Maybe a bit too rare. Not all Abysian nations should in my opinion have them, though.

Koti.kapsi.fi

-------------------------

Koti.kapsi.fi

Sacred cap only recruitment was bugged in two extremely stupid ways.

Edited by: elmokki

First, thank you for great tool. I love this!

And bug report:
I try to generate 10 nation in once.
Most part is no problem. But custom weapons are sometimes overwriting old ones.

--- Generic custom items.
#newweapon 700
#name "Corrosive Bite"
...
#end

#newweapon 701
#name "Warhorse Hoof"
...
#end

#newweapon 700
#name "Smiting Great Sword"
...
#end

#newweapon 701
#name "Agarthan Javelin"
...
#end

#newweapon 702
#name "Boulder"
...
#end

Edit:
Oops, I notice to cause of this.
Old data of generated nations seem not cleared properly.
If I generate nation again and again without restart of tool, later dm files contain old custom weapons too.

Edited by: Golog

Golog wrote: First, thank you for great tool. I love this!

And bug report:
I try to generate 10 nation in once.
Most part is no problem. But custom weapons are sometimes overwriting old ones.

--- Generic custom items.
#newweapon 700
#name "Corrosive Bite"
...
#end

#newweapon 701
#name "Warhorse Hoof"
...
#end

#newweapon 700
#name "Smiting Great Sword"
...
#end

#newweapon 701
#name "Agarthan Javelin"
...
#end

#newweapon 702
#name "Boulder"
...
#end

Edit:
Oops, I notice to cause of this.
Old data of generated nations seem not cleared properly.
If I generate nation again and again without restart of tool, later dm files contain old custom weapons too.

Thanks for reporting this. I'll fix it for the next version.

--------------------------------------------------

0.1.0, some of the changes:
- Fixed a bug with custom items and generating multiple batches without restarting the program. Thanks to Golog for reporting.
- Ported Caelian race from Dominions 3 version
- Ported Machakan race from Dominions 3 version with very heavy revisions to make them feel a bit more Machakan than the other human race.
- Changed prioritizing of sacred unit type - less chariots/ranged/mounted sacreds now.
- Changed naming algorithms a bit
- Added a .txt file explaining some of the rarer commands usable when making content
- Pile of other fixes or tweaks I can't remember anymore

Get it from original post.

Edited by: elmokki

I've generated a few sets of nations over the last couple of versions, and I noticed something problematic. A lot of nations - by no means all, but a lot - will have, for lack of a better description, Dom3-style national commanders. I've had nations with three mundane 40-troop commanders, and no difference between them beyond their equipment. These are commanders I frankly wouldn't care to choose over indy commanders for any reason. And the mages are frequently 10-troop commanders, so there's a decent chance they'll be no help. If it's coupled with default morales (also not uncommon) it can spell disaster for a nation, as they field small squads of skittish troops.

Adding flat leadership bonuses (the +20 we saw a lot of in... 4.02, I think?) or weighting more for higher base leadership would help a lot. Even throwing around more Inspiration would be good. But right now it seemed like around 1/3-1/2 of nations I generated either had no good leaders or no good mundane leaders. Small sample size, so I'm speculating and may have had bad luck, but it would be nice if there was a check to make sure there was some reasonable leadership, so you don't end up with a nation who's got 2 dull 40s and a pile of magical 10s.