Tataraba, Gunpowder against the Gods: A Princess Mononoke Mod Thread - Dominions 4: Thrones of Ascension

Inspired by the classic anime Princess Mononoke, this mod adds a new Late Era nation, Tataraba (Irontown in the movie), with the following:

- New units! Tataraba’s bread and butter is the Riflewoman, a slightly better version of the basic crossbowman with three key advantages – she can damage ethereal units, she does double damage to magic creatures, and she is fanatically loyal to her cause. Other Tataraban soldiers wield grenades, grenade launcher-style Ishibiya, or flamethrowers that can scorch whole squares. Stealthy Jibashiri hunters can infilitrate enemy provinces and use their blowpipes, grenades, and rifles to pick off unwary defenders. Lepers’ afflictions make them poor soldiers, but they inspire friendly units in the same squad.
- Mages with forge bonuses and drain immunity!
- New spell! Sick of enemies sneaking through your provinces? Construct Glider allows players to field an unarmed scout with flight, stealth, a patrol bonus, and immortality (representing the pilot flying out of danger).
- New national pretender! The Godkiller is a human air/earth/fire mage armed with an ishibiya; she is a superb leader in battle and freespawns riflewomen every month in which she is in her own dominion.
- Some weaknesses! While Tataraba has devastating ranged weapons, it lacks cavalry (and dedicated melee units), heavy armour, and powerful mages.

The mod doesn't have sprites or national heroes yet, and balance is still a work in progress. However, it's fully playable, and you can download the current version of the mod (0.04) here. Install by placing the contents of the zip file in your c:\users\your name\app data\roaming\dominions 4\mods folder. Enjoy the mod, and suggestions are welcome!

I will be keeping an eye on this. Mononoke Hime is one of my fav animated films, and this sounds awesome.

Thanks, MAurelius11!

Here are the new units and notable mages/commanders (i.e. excluding troop ferries):

Edit: are spoiler tags broken? I tried hiding each set of images behind a spoiler but no joy.

Pretender

Riflewomen (standard unit)

Jibashiri (stealthy units)

Ishibiya-shu (infantry with explosive weapons)

Pioneers (flamethrowers)

Lepers (sacred standard-bearer)

Traveller (stealthy H1 priest)

Mages

Glider

Edited by: psahui

Very cool! I wish we had a #magiconly weapon mod command so you could make the iron weapons cause disease on magic beings instead of just doing double damage.

Very nice idea! I will be watching your career with much interest!

Interesting, but at first glance, the rifles seem a bit overpowered, with so much magic damage for common troops.

Ighalli wrote: Very cool! I wish we had a #magiconly weapon mod command so you could make the iron weapons cause disease on magic beings instead of just doing double damage.

honestly, to be accurate it should apply disease and berserk. but this may be a bit over powered.

Thanks, guys!

Ighalli, ZombY_Cola - that's a great idea! Oh well, maybe one day.

Gwyllion - I hear what you're saying, but since in the movie they are effective against an IMHO ethereal being, I wanted to reflect that in the mod. If it's any consolation, they do cost a bit more than crossbows. Do magic weapons affect anything other than ethereality/mistform? (I'm a bit rusty -- spent much more time with Dom3 than Dom4).

It's been a long time since I saw the movie, but I'm glad to see a mod along these lines! Magic weapons also ignore the "Invulnerability" stat in addition to Ethereal and Mistform, and I agree that it would be extremely overpowering to grant every unit magic weapons.

Perhaps you would consider making an "Elite" or "Blessed" riflewoman unit and give that one unit magic weapons, while making all other rifles fire mundane (but #piercing) rounds. You could give these "elite" units the #holy tag, also.

Good idea - thanks, Joonai! I'll probaby implement that in the next version of the mod, and drop the resource costs down a point or two to compensate.

Has anyone had the chance to play around with the mod yet? Love to hear hands-on impressions.

Joonai wrote: It's been a long time since I saw the movie, but I'm glad to see a mod along these lines! Magic weapons also ignore the "Invulnerability" stat in addition to Ethereal and Mistform, and I agree that it would be extremely overpowering to grant every unit magic weapons.

Perhaps you would consider making an "Elite" or "Blessed" riflewoman unit and give that one unit magic weapons, while making all other rifles fire mundane (but #piercing) rounds. You could give these "elite" units the #holy tag, also.

To compare, EA/MA/LA Caelum has relatively easy access to magic weapons, and comparatively are saddled with bad troops, though that's also a function of an almost entirely airborne faction.

Access to magic weapons requires some caution, given how readily it pops most thugging/SCing tools like Mistform, Stygian Skin, etc.

My personal concern is the drain scale immunity, and thus effective 80-120 points you can earn from taking it.

Thanks for the feedback, Stannis! Do you think magic weapons would still work if restricted to a rare (some combination of expensive, cap-only, perhaps sacred or limited-recruitment) unit? From a thematic perspective, I'd like to keep limited access to anti-thug weapons, as I think it would fit the faction's ethos of human ingenuity trumping divine (or in this case magical) forces. Ditto the researchers being able to work in the drain scale a la LA Man, although I'm happy to address balance by changing other areas.

Here's a question for you guys -- do you think the mages are overpowered? You have:

* The E2 OR F2 forge supervisor;
* The E3F1 OR F3E1 (with a further 10% random) forge engineer, who is StR; and
* The A2?2 leper gunsmith, who is also StR.

Given that other late era nations have 4-pick mages who are not StR (see e.g. Man's Magisters Arcane, Jomon's master shugenja), this doesn't seem too bad, but I keep wondering if I should remove the 2-pick forge supervisor entirely, take away 1 pick from the remaining mages (forge engineer and leper gunsmith), and remove StR to compensate. This would lead to E2F1/F2E1 forge engineers, recruitable anywhere in 1 turn, comparable to a MA Ulm master smith. Thoughts?

The magic Paths are actually really good. They lack a good research mage (replace/weaken Forge supervisors to fill that role, some cost efficiency is necessary), but their STR mages are all extremely potent in their field. Current Forge Supervisors have access to nifty stuff already (E2 and F2 are very powerful), and they can already cast Flaming Arrows for Rifles with Phoenix Power. This is the non-STR mage. The STR mages are extremely powerful. They have weak magic, but the magic they do have is very potent. E3 (!!!) with Fire means massive Magma Eruptions, Earthquakes (and the nation has innate Air for levitation), and other high Earth Goodies (just throw on an Earth Boots easy). F3 means pretty heavy-weight fire evos. And the Air is enough for Wind Guide. Given the pretender has AEF, you also get cheap access to high Fire, Air for forging boosters. and easy site searching.

Bit too strong of magic given how well they mesh together, hampered only by their research costs (which can be defrayed by just forging Quills for 1 air gem apiece [easy access to Air AND E3 means at Const-2 their research can start snowballing) and STR status. I'd have to test this nation in an actual MP game, but it's pretty strong theoretically if they can get the research going. And with the relative strength of their recruits currently as an all range force, it's pretty likely.

I would argue that the faction needs to have some dedicated melee weapons (daggers on everyone is abit boring). Giving them access to some Yaris would be fine, tbh, as a sidearm, given its use in the movies as well. I wouldn't give them access to the glaive (the name escapes me), but Yaris are fine. Also, a mundane commander with more than 40ldr so I won't just recruit indie commanders (or mounted indie commanders) for either the same purpose or just better leadership/ferrying capacity.

I don't think that universal magic weapons are a bad idea, per se, but it in conjunction with x2 damage to magic beings invalidates a number of summons. Would keep the x2 damage to magic beings universally, but reduce the magic damage to the Rifle (the 50r, 1 attack in 3 rounds weapon), while opening up a number of these for extra categories. Give it increased cost (resource or gold) so there is a clear choice between normal efficiency and dedicating production towards anti-Lemuria or anti-thug units. The grenades should get fire damage and piercing (simulating the explosion and shrapnel, which is what probably kils) extra to replace the magic damage, as should the AoE-1 range weapon.

Edited by: StannisdaMannis

Okay, I tried it out in PvE and I really like it. I have a few comments and some things I changed.
1. Like Stannis said, I thought the magic weapon was not only against the theme here, but overpowered as well. So i removed magic weapon from all but the Jibashiri rifle.
2. I also added pierce to the grenade attack. I also added AoE 1 stun to the grenade attack, too, using the secondaryeffectalways command. I thought that was appropriate and makes up for the loss of magic weapons. I recommend doing this with the Tataraban Ishibiya as well, since that it also an explosive shell.
3. I also took Stannis's advice and changed the dagger to spear for the grenadiers and riflewomen. I'm not sure if it made a big difference, but without any melee troops otherwise, this did change the makeup of my field armies knowing that they could do an ok job of defending themselves. But even so, not too many got close enough to do much damage in melee anyway. This leads me to the conclusion that this nation is still a bit too overpowered.
4. I think the flamethrower range is too great and I would like to see it more like the attack a fire drake does. Along those lines, I would also like to see the pioneers be given the new formationfighter attribute so you can put them in a line without a morale loss. This would keep the friendly fire to a minimum. I'm not sure how true to the source material that would be, however.
5. The descriptive text about the mercenaries (ishibiya-shu) states that they are not as motivated, and yet they still have a morale of 11, which is better than most every standard troop in the game, so I recommend bringing those back to 10.
6. It seems counterintuitive to me that the forge engineer would have a better leadership ability than an actual combat leader. I recommend changing forge engineer to okleader or less and bringing one or both of the lieutenants up to goodleader.
7. I like that the lepers and leper gunsmiths start with afflictions, but I wish we could change what the choices of affliction would be. Since they are slowrec, I hated waiting two turns only to recruit one who arrived mute or diseased. It just was not worth the risk and I stopped recruiting them at all. You might want to take a look at removing the slow requirement and maybe making them so that the number you can have is dependant upon your dominion. I can't recall what that attribute is called.
8. I recommend making the Tataraban Traveller a spy, to match the description.
9. The Tataraban Glider never showed up in the game as a castable ritual. I verified I had the correct spellpaths, etc., so I'm not sure why. Maybe you could help me figure that one out. It is possible that because you did not give it a spellnumber that the automatic number the game chose for it was later chosen by another newspell with the same number in another mod... but that is just a wild guess I have not yet tested.
10. I recommend using different sprites for the commanders so we can recognize them on the battlefield.

Overall assessment is that this is a lot of fun to play. I like the concept and I like the execution. The thrill of wondering if my troops will be able to to wither down the enemy enough before they get into melee range made all the battles that much more exciting. This would play completely differently in a MP game, and I think that too would be neat.

I look forward to seeing some of the heroes you come up with!

Edited by: Chaos-Serpent