Themiskyra v1.0 Thread - Dominions 4: Thrones of Ascension

So I made my first Dominions 4 mod nation: Themiskyra

Dropbox.com

It is playable in the middle and late era. I've done my best to keep the art consistent with KO's art, so the units should look like they belong in the game.
Middle Era is a combination of clans descended from the various tribes of Amazons displaced by Ermor at the end of the Early Era. Late Era is more based on the 7th century Bohemian Maiden's War and is a new kingdom of women who have based their philosophy and system of government on the kingdom of Amazons from the previous era.

There are still some bugs in the modding code, so this is still necessarily a work in progress that won't be "complete" until some things get patched. In addition, there are doubtless some errors/typos in my mod and/or graphics as well and I apologize in advance for that.

-Frank

Edited by: FrankTrollman

Trying it , seems interesting. Nice touch giving them basically all female pretenders.

One thing I've noticed, but I suspect that's an issue with 'vanilla'amazons too...why the Str 9?
Yes, I understand that it might be meant to portray women are, on average, not as physically strong as men, but these are amazons and so likely to be quite fit, so maybe make the default Str 10. The troops which currently have Str 10 could stay at that, or even go up to 11.

And since I was mentioning fitness...why enc 4 on the skirmisher? Is that just for balance? Thought enc 3 would be the default.

Edit: also, having multiple units with the same name, 'Amazon', makes battle reports somewhat less informative. I can't tell at a glance how many archer and how many melee amazons died...

And when one of my gryphon priestess commanders died..the gryphon was left behind..and it still had holy levels. Mildly amusing, I guess? One way to 'fix' this could perhaps be to make the gryphons left by commanders be special in that they go away after the battle. Maybe you could make them autoberserk though?(They're more attached to their riders so..)

Edited by: TheZonk

On the Skirmisher. She's not a warrior trained from childhood, she's just a woman who showed up and wanted to fight. Every woman who does that is guaranteed a shield and a spear, which is also why they are cheaper in Turmoil dominion (in turmoil, more random women want to take up the spear). Her attack skill and encumbrance are just worse than a proper Amazon. They are like your militia basically.

For Strength 9, I wanted to keep this vision of Themiskyra as close as possible to the core game. The Amazon Tribes have strength 9 troops, so the Amazon Kingdom has strength 9 troops as well. The big differences are equipment and cost. The Amazons Tribes are equipped with early era equipment such as scale armor, and the middle and late era kingdoms have the more advanced (and superior) chain mail. Also the independent Amazons use short bows and iron caps, while the Sauromatian nation uses composite bows and half helmets, so moving forward into the middle and late eras I had them use the better bows and helmets given the option. The other issue is cost. While most of the costs in Dominions 4 are based on the Autocalc, there is a substantial fudge factor involved, and the independent Amazon Tribals pay a quite significant markup for being independents with unusual paths - there is an extra 40 gold kicker to all the Amazon Tribal Sorceresses. I took that out for your national casters, because they are your normal national casters.

On the Gryphon Priestess: that is hilarious. I can see exactly why that happened. I just used the regular code for a Garnet Amazon Gryphon Rider. They die and you get a sacred gryphon in her place. For the priestess, it stays a leader and then since it's the same unit it keeps all the magic paths. Moving forward, I can give it a path penalty in its second shape to make that go away (#magicboost with a negative number). That will happen in the next patch.

Good point on the units being named Amazon. The original units they are based on are all named "Amazon", but for purposes of the nation they should be called "Jade Clan Amazon" and such. That will also happen in the next patch.

Thank you for your feedback.

-Frank

Sorry if the feedback before sounded too negative btw - I quite like this mod overall, though I really haven't played much with LA(I'm more of an EA person, so MA is closer to that)

I understand your arguments on the encumbrance and strength , though I still think str 10 would be nice, for one str 9 makes ,most amazons almost 20% worse than a regolar troop at sieging, if I understand the siege rules right - not like it's too important.
I also understand preferring being faithful to the vanilla game though, and agree equipment makes a huge difference.

I don't think there's an issue with the caster costs(though I focused more on the troops on my testing). And autocalc should always be considered a suggestion so really, I wouldn't worry about that.

Speaking of militia, you're sure you want to give garnet amazons in PD? I thought they were fairly elite-ish? I also wanted to comment on 15 fire resistance being a bit too much on the troops since they're still mostly human after all...but then I realized that's exactly what they have in vanilla/core so they likely should stay as they are.

On the gryphons, the way you you want to handle that should work, though I think having the gryphon go berserk would be more flavourful than keeping the gryphon commander.
That gryphon also had 'lost two arms'affliction btw, which it might have inherited from the priestess - but I'm not sure what could be done about that.

One small issue with LA(which as I've said I've only given a quick glance)...the nuns feel out of place to me. They're vanilla units from a site which you're re-using as is I think? Could have a new commander that is meant to be a healer instead.

And to end on a positive note - congratulations on the heroines, they look pretty nice and flavourful! Cyrene being able to do 'the work of a hundred men' is quite awesome(if a bit exaggerated), and the heretic is very thematic. They all look quite powerful, which is what I think heroes/heroines should be.

Hey, this looks pretty good, Frank. Nice work!

The way PD works is pretty weird. in your fort provinces, you get defunit1 and defunit1b as your 1-19 units, and in your non-fort provinces you get defunit1 and defunit1b as your 20+ units. So until we get more nuanced modding commands, you have to use the same units for your "basic" province defense as you do for your "elite" province defense in different provinces. This may actually be a bug, I'm not sure.

I know getting leader Gryphons is really weird, but like with Black Hunters of Machaka it sort of has to work that way. Otherwise you end up having your squads run away even though you still have the unit that led them there in the first place.

-Frank

Wasn't this a dom3 mod, or was that another nation with the same name?

Admiral_Aorta wrote: Wasn't this a dom3 mod, or was that another nation with the same name?

I did a Dominions 3 mod along these lines that naturally had the same name. It was somewhat overpowered I'm afraid. There weren't any cost formulas in Dominions 3, and you kind of had to throw a dart on costs more than you do with Dominions 4. In Dominions 4 you can actually see how much extra gold you're paying for them being "bonus neutral units" and take it out, rather than making up a new cost from scratch.

Also, I am not afraid to admit that I was too ambitious in adding special features the last time around.

-Frank

Interesting mod, Frank. I think you did a good job keeping the sprites consistent with the Dominions style.

In the middle era nation, I noticed that the description of the Onyx Sorceress seemed to imply that they are priestesses or sacred units, but they aren't. I know it's just generalized text talking about priestesses and sorceresses, but something more specific to Onyx Sorceresses might be nice.

Also, I know there are more to mods than artwork, but are you thinking about making an overview sheet, like the ones that can be found at Llamaserver.net ?

Currently, the Priestesses and Sorceresses of each clan have the same blurb on them, as they do in vanilla. The text has of course been updated to refer to the kingdom of Themiskyra rather than the individual tribes. But both the casters of the Onyx Clan refer to the specialty of the clan, which is that their Priestesses are higher status and more powerful than those of other clans. Which is true, the Onyx Priestess is a level 2 Priest while the other priestesses are level 1 Priests. According to the autocalc, this worth the same amount as the Jade Priestess' higher magic level.

As for making a picture block, the thought had certainly occurred to me. The main thing holding it back is that I can't figure out how to put pictures on this forum. It runs everything off of html instead of bbcode, but then it parses the html incredibly badly and also has some sort of WYSIWYG interpretation that doesn't work at all. It's pretty frustrating.

-Frank

Can we give the the priestess' griffin shape Berserk+1? Throw in a line of text about lifebonds and vengeance. That way you have a good chance of getting the leader gryphon killed off eventually.

Orionja wrote: Can we give the the priestess' griffin shape Berserk+1? Throw in a line of text about lifebonds and vengeance. That way you have a good chance of getting the leader gryphon killed off eventually.

Something like that could happen I suppose. I'm not really sure I see the rationale. Leader Black Spiders stick around, last I checked.

-Frank

Nightmare an 15 encumberance (its from the base game), but it's that right?

Korwin077 wrote: Nightmare an 15 encumberance (its from the base game), but it's that right?

Yes. The lore is that the Nightmare rider uses her own life force to power the undead steed, which is very draining. This manifests as an absurdly high encumbrance value. Probably something similar could be done with giving them a regular encumbrance value and a negative reinvig value, but the base game does it this way and I saw no reason to change it.

By the way: Nightmares with an Earth Bless are pretty impressive, and totally worth 80 gold a piece. A squad of fear causing cavalry is fairly amazing.

-Frank

Played both yesterday with an friend (me LA, he MA). (we played both against the AI, no duel)
LA is great. Very good Archers and both Wind Guide and Flaming Arrows possible with national mages.

MA great diversity but no magic path above 2 (without a 10 random or summons) seems a little limiting. Against the AI it wasnt a problem, but I imagine against an player it would.

Bug : "Ensnare Bean Sidhe" has the same effect as "Call Beregina", probably a copy/paste error

Also, what is supposed to be the required terrain for Call Beregina ? I supposed from the description that it required a coastal province, but it didn't work in a swamp that was near a sea, while my capital near another sea province or two was accepted(the capital itself was in a forest or montain I think).

jtrowell wrote: Bug : "Ensnare Bean Sidhe" has the same effect as "Call Beregina", probably a copy/paste error

Fixed. Now it gives you the Bean Sidhe it's supposed to.

Also, what is supposed to be the required terrain for Call Beregina ? I supposed from the description that it required a coastal province, but it didn't work in a swamp that was near a sea, while my capital near another sea province or two was accepted(the capital itself was in a forest or montain I think).

It's supposed to be "Coast or Sea." Looking at the tags, it is following the manual. It's possible that one or more province types overwrites the coastal tag. That seems like a bug that I can't do anything about with mod commands.

-Frank

By the way, something that I thought after trying EA Ulm recently - you could put some Ulmians women in the MA lineup? Notice how in MA Ulm women don't get to fight, while they had quite a prominent role in EA so maybe some warrior-women of Ulm decided to join the amazon .Maybe if you want to have some heavily-armored units, you could have them bring some knowledge of advanced smithing.

David88 wrote: By the way, something that I thought after trying EA Ulm recently - you could put some Ulmians women in the MA lineup? Notice how in MA Ulm women don't get to fight, while they had quite a prominent role in EA so maybe some warrior-women of Ulm decided to join the amazon .Maybe if you want to have some heavily-armored units, you could have them bring some knowledge of advanced smithing.

A goodly number of Themiskyrans in both eras may be fed-up Ulmish women. I borrowed heavily from the EA Ulmish female warrior sprites to make several of their units, especially in the late era. The Onyx Archer wears Onyx Clan colors on her tabbard, uses a Themiskyran bow, and wears a Themiskyran helmet, but the unit is templated off the Warrior Maiden of EA Ulm.

Korwin wrote: LA is great. Very good Archers and both Wind Guide and Flaming Arrows possible with national mages.

By the way, which archer do you find most useful?

-Frank

I used most often the resource cheapest (12 prec.) second often the (huntress?) One with 14 prec.
Did not recruit the most expensive (resource) one.

I had an e9 bless for the valyries, would'nt do it again. (Game will be continued when I meet him again)
Either more scales or more diversity.

I only used the heavily armored archers when I was setting up some creaative archer screens to confuse enemy scripting. Otherwise it was the low-resource, recruit-anywhere variety, and sometimes hunters.

Also, let me say that those Themiskrya militia are just about the best chaff you could ask for. They are cheap (in turmoil domain they are extremely cheap), low-resource, high morale, high-defense, possess a shield, and are not undisciplined. When led by a 120 leadership Warrior Princess or the like, those militia will very nearly fight to the last woman, and are genuinely difficult for non-elite units to hit (between the racially high defense, the shield, and the lack of armor encumbrance). And since they are fort-less recruit-any, you will always have more of them around to replace losses. They're great.

One reason I brought up EA Ulm women was that they have strength 11(though the men there are strength 12..Ulmians are badass), so if you wanted to have Strength 11 troops, there's a bit of a precedent. Of course, likely not needed, since the nation is quite nice already.

On the nightmare: it might be interesting if it could be balanced by making the Fear aura affect friendly troops too(except other nightmares, duh)..but that's just not possible, sadly. 15 encumbrance is terrible, but then fear-causing troops are powerful, and that's what they have in vanilla.

Edited by: TheZonk

About the terrain restriction, I had similar problems when trying to summon the bean sidhe in the corrected version.

Note that vanilla spells with terrain restriction list the needed terrain in the spell itself, while the modded spells do not. Thinking that it was maybe due to the multiple terrain restrction, I tried to change the bean sidhe spell to only require a forect, quitted and reloaded the game (usually changes to a mod works for existing games if you quit and reload the game), but my caster in a forest still got a "wrong terrain" error, and the spell still don't says in the headers that it require a forest.

I think that maybe the modding command is broken, or maybe that the terrain list is not the appropriate one for this command.

If you want to reload a mod to test changes you can simply load a game which doesn't have that mod loaded, then reload the game which did have it loaded.

I keep a game called 'AAA_Clearmods' to load just for these occasions.

I didn't know this trick, thanks for the info Sombre.