Expansion Pack: Sceleria Thread - Dominions 4: Thrones of Ascension

...so I says to myself, I says: "self, making new factions takes forever, and by the end you're too burnt out on the nation to want to play it anyway. If you still want to mess around with modding" - and I do - "why not expand some official factions? There's plenty of Dom4 nations that could use a little love". So I arbitrarily decided to start with the faction I was experimenting with at the time, and then wham!

Expansion Pack: Sceleria (<-download link) is a mini-mod that adds new units, commanders and items to the MA nation, as well as rebalancing the previously existing ones so that everything in the faction has a viable niche.
So what's changed?

(For a more comprehensive list, check out the pleasantly-formatted readme!)

New Stuff: The Scorpionarius and Equite Sagittatorium now make an appearance in every fort, giving the faction some ranged game. The Broken Augur is shyer, hiding himself away in Wastelands. You can make 'em all worship the Spirit of the Eternal Gladiator, an immortal thug pretender chassis, and if you take Luck you might see some Lords Cardinal - the faction's newest (and so far only) multiheroes. Oh, and some of them can wear Stygian Helms, though most of them probably shouldn't.

Awesomer Old Stuff: Shudder at recruit-everywhere Lictors (though slightly nerfed)! Tremble before non-disappearing Gladiators and Retiarii (with high upkeep costs)! Point and laugh at more expensive temples (they can't all be winners)!

Also lil' changes, like Slingers being less awful and wearing properly Scelerian Red coloured t-shirts, and Praetorian Guard being buffed to near-usability. The full list's in the readme!

Notes:
Balance: This is primarily a "new stuff" mod, and it's more powerful overall than the base faction due to things being (mostly) buffed to improve usability rather than toned down. And of course Sceleria wasn't all that weak a faction to begin with. That doesn't mean I'm not interested in balance feedback, however - I particularly want to know if something's so good it overshadows everything else, or if it's so terrible that no-one will ever go near it.

Compatibility:
-This mod is MC compatible as of the 3 November spreadsheet update.
-It won't break any other existing official factions, as I duplicated units that are used by other nations (e.g. Slingers and Gladiators) before changing them.
-Compatibility with mods that rebalance the game wholesale (such as a hypothetical CBM) obviously can't be guaranteed in advance.
-To be compatible with Worthy Heroes, this mod must be activated first. If in doubt, deactivate both mods then reactivate both in order - Expansion Pack: Sceleria first, then WH.
-I've added code at the end of the .dm that can make it compatible with Sombre's excellent Mobility mod [Edit: It's Llamabeast's, not Sombre's. Apologies!]. If you've decided to live life in the fast lane, simply delete the '--' at the start of every line in the section at the end of the .dm to activate it.

Usage: If you want to use any of this in your own mods, go for it! Most of the spritework's Frankensteined anyway.

Other mods in this series:
Expansion Pack: Eriu
Expansion Pack: Blood and Fire

Edited by: gothefungus

Ooh, what does the helmet do? Looks cool!

+1D +1H, cursed&diseases wearer. Const6, requires 4D1S. I wanted a way of bridging to Skullfaces (since Sceleria can't make them with national mages any more) that wouldn't stack. Access to H4s is also pretty cool, I'm hoping the fact that you have to put your Grand Thaumaturges through Twiceborn first if you want them to survive the disease is a sufficient balancing factor.

(also the flavour element - only undead can cope with the magic of ancient Stygia!)

Looks quite interesting and I'll definetely try it, though I wish it was fully compatible with Worthy Heroes - any chance you could get it to work without any issues?

Edit: Also, OpenOffice seems to have issues reading the changelist file...

Edited by: TheZonk

Small note: I didn't make the mobility mod. Llamabeast did.

I'll take a look at this for MC.

Also, here's an idea I considered using myself for a mod nation and which might fit your gladiator changes: you could give them a capital site that lets troops gain experience, not a large amount(maybe less than the current magic site that does that) but it would let you improve troops sitting at the capital.

Quick thoughts: Yiou're using #firstshape to get the gladiator's extra upkeep. couldn't you use the #gold command instead. That would mean the unit gets an icon but you likely won't see the increase yearly upkeep in the morale screen. So your choice as to which is better.
Also, I expected the Spirit of Gladiator to have somewhat better fighting stats - not quite a titan, but superhuman(it's not, except for HP and Mr, but then it IS a pretender). Of course, it's immortal and has the domsummon, so it's priced ok at 25. Maybe -1 enc if you want to give it a slight boost?

Edited by: TheZonk

Sombledon wrote: Small note: I didn't make the mobility mod. Llamabeast did.

Argh! Sorry about that. I think my brain put it in the same (awesome) category as the No Indies/AI Recruitment mods.

@David88: It's about 95% compatible with Worthy Heroes, the game doesn't crash or anything - what happens in practice is that you end up with both my (minor) changes and Burnsaber's (major!) changes on the same unit, and some of the stats you end up with actually depend on the order in which you activate the two mods, which is clumsy. Here's a version of the mod (just the mod, you'll still need the zip from the OP for the sprites) with my changes stripped out so it's 100% compatible. If more people are interested, I'll add the stripped version to the zip as well.

I did test the negative #gold option, but I found the results a little unintuitive when you have large numbers of gold-negative troops - when looking at the world map screen, "I have very high upkeep and need to do something about it" makes more sense in my mind than "wait, why is my monthly income so low?".

With the Eternal Gladiator's stats I was going for "elite human", with the supernatural element being represented by his high HP and Invulnerability (to represent the Spirit pushing the host beyond its mortal endurance levels). He does have base Def13 and Att14, which are Captain America-level stats in Dominions terms.

Are you having issues with the linked version of the readme, or the one in the zip? If the former, Dropbox is doing something screwy with the preview version (it opened as a PDF on my machine, for some reason), but it should work OK if you click the 'Download' button.

Edit: realised I'd kind of screwed up the heroes anyway. OP upgraded to version 1.1 which includes the Worthy Heroes compatible version.

(New for 18 November: )
Burnsaber just updated Worthy Heroes to 1.1, which includes brand new heroes for Sceleria. Awesome!

...Of course, Expansion Pack: Sceleria resets the recruitment list, so they won't show up even in the "WHC" version I uploaded, depending on the order you activate the mods in.

So new plan: If you want to play with both, Expansion Pack: Sceleria must be activated before Worthy Heroes. If in doubt, deactivate both then reactivate them in the above order. I've also edited these instructions into the OP.

Edited by: gothefungus

I can't seem to get the Stygian Helms to show up. I am using the Worthy Heros and this mod with the Debug mod. I loaded the mods in every possible order. Everything else seems to be correct, although I haven't seen the Broken Auger as I have not been near any wastelands.

The Helm requires level 6 Construction magic, as well as 4 Death and 1 Astral on the same mage, so it's not exactly easy to get! It's there to let you bypass a little problem Sceleria has with getting from 4 Death to 5 Death, so it's not intended to show up until fairly late in the game.

The debug mod won't help with this (except that the Debug Sensei will be able to craft anything), because it works by manually making every item in the vanilla game Const0. Items added by mods aren't on the debug list and will appear at their original Const requirement.

I just ran a test on the Broken Lands game mod (since that's what you'll be using from that thread) and the Helm showed up fine once a mage with the right paths was available.

If you want to have a look at the helm in-game without having to play single-player up to Const 6, you'll need to open Expansion Sceleria.dm in a text editor, ctrl+f to find "Stygian Helm", and change the line that says #constlevel 6 to #constlevel 0 - then start a game with it plus debug mod (order of activation doesn't matter) and summon a Debug Sensei to do the forging. Don't change your Broken Lands.dm, or you might forget to change it back and risk a conflict.

If you just want to see what it does, here's a handy jpeg:

Edited by: gothefungus

Thanks for the response. I was using the Debug Sensei to view the item. I understand why that didn't work now.