Mod: Ulm Reborn v.1.7b - Updated 14th June 2009

[Sombre]

Ok v0.4 is another balance fixer with no new content. The position should be a bit stronger now thanks to better fort setup, non-old white priests unaffected by drain and numerous other tweaks.

[Shovah32]

Apart from national summons(which are hard to balance impliment and invent) you made basically all the changes i want.

Do pentients cost upkeep? I relied purely on sacred troops and mages but got a high upkeep quickly so im not sure. For the white mage guy would a minor(im thinking maybe 10%) forge bonus be unthematic? I just feel it would help(and you have some very thuggable commanders).

My biggest problem is probably that any bless that works well with your recruitables(with the exception of n9 imo) dosnt really help pentients - they like fire, water, death, astral and blood due to their survivability problems and 2 attacks where-as your sacreds(although fire and water also help your expensive capitol only cavalry) like earth, nature and maybe a minor astral bless.

One strategy I like:
Imprisoned Cyclops
Earth9(it is amazing on your high prot sacreds)N9(berserk is good and the regen on 30health guardian commanders is nice)
Dominion 4(can be increased with temples and early on you cant make many sacreds)
order3,prod3,death2,cold2,misfortune2,drain3

The cyclops is a nice combatant when he breaks out(29 prot and insane regen when he casts personal regen), even with so many negative scales you have 13% more income and 30% more resources than base scales.

Your sacreds, with their god-like protection(anchorites and templar have 24 head 25 body where-as neugeboren guard have 24 head 27 body. Your capitol churns out mages, guards and templars as recuired and your forts produce acolytes, anchorites and black zweihanders.

Your hochmeisters(better defence and more attacks) and neugeboren lords(better prot and health, fear, standard, can wear boots) can make great thugs.


One suggestion i would make for the mod is adding a 50% random for earth/astral and another 10% random for astral to white priests.

[Sombre]

Ok v0.4 is going up now. I actually had it done last time I posted but forgot to upload it. Doh.

One new thing that I've put in is awe (0) on the Neugeboren Lord (and on the white priest, but who cares about that?). At 300 gold he isn't going to be overpowering or anything - it just reinforces that the Lords are real badasses. And yeah, he makes a good thug. I was actually able to thug them up very early in a test game due to all the earth magic.

Oh and the drain immune white priest is in there.

I think adding astral to the white priests might well happen in the future. I'm very tempted to make a new kind of priests so you can go a very heavy penitent route with the nation if you want. Something like an H1 no magic priest with high leadership who spawns many penitent but really doesn't do much else. Black shepherd maybe?

[Sombre]

Ok after some thinking,... the white priests are getting one astral each. This is primarily to allow them to cast thew two national summons,..

One summons 5 Sternkind - These are sort of ulmish angels. They can fly, have hammers and are sacred. They whomp a fair bit of ***, but cost astral pearls, which ulm reborn doesn't have in abundance. They can only be cast by white priests (req S1 H3).

The other summons one Sternheld commander unit - A more powerful sternkind that could be a good thug. On top of that it has A1 F1. Both units have tasty holy hammers.

I've also given level 1 ulm priests the spell healing light for free and level 2 priests will get a form of wind guide to make those crossbows more useful - hopefully i can get it to be neagted by anything but low MR, similar to the LA Ulm national spell for E3 (i forget the name).

I'm also working on a grand hochmeister leader (possibly hero) but I'm having a lot of trouble getting the templar graphic extracted so I can modify it. I made one that looked pretty good but it was sized wrong becuase I have to do that mostly by eye.

[Shovah32]

Is there a reason pentients only have fists in the most current version?

[Sombre]

Probably because I forgot to give them a weapon. It seems like I'm doomed to miss countless little errors with releases of this nation. Probably because I haven't had time to playtest them much at all.

-sigh-

New version will be up tomorrow or the day after. In the meantime I suggest going into the dm file and giving them a flail.

The new version will feature the badass Hochhammer leader, who carries an incredibly powerful divine hammer and has what I think are the best graphics I've done so far. He'll be expensive and have zero magic/priest powers, but he'll make a scary thug commander and have some other nice abilities. I'm tempted to make him a hero, but I want to show off the graphic in the main lineup and I know Ulm Reborn doesn't really like to take luck domain.

After that release I'm going back to work on all 3 released mods at once; I want to get them all to a 'final' version. That means lots of actually playing the game and enjoying other people's mods too (updating modlist in the process).

[Shovah32]

Sounds good, sombre.

[SlipperyJim]

Looks good, Sombre. I'll try it out this evening and send you some more feedback.

[Sombre]

Release tomorrow probably. You get national summon troops (sternkind) and national summon leader (sternheld) with new graphics, as well as the hochhammer.

I've run into a lot of bugs ith modding commands trying to get this stuff working. Contrary to what I was expecting, this has turned out to be the hardest nation to mod so far.

For example - Copyspell doesn't work, aoe on weapons doesn't work, secondaryeffectalways doesn't seem to work properly,.. etc.

[SlipperyJim]

Okay, I played another quick game with v0.4. Here are some more thoughts:

• The Penitent is not sacred anymore. (He also doesn't have a weapon, but you knew that.)
• Stealthy Black Advocates are very cool indeed.
• Reborn Lords are fantastic thugs. N9E9 bless makes them even better.
• Bless me? Bless you!
• The Fortified City is a welcome addition to the capital. Now I can start cranking those lovely Black Templars and Reborn Guardians off of the assembly line in a reasonable period of time.
• The White Priests don't have any Sorcery magic yet. I'm figuring that this will happen in the new release, but I wanted to make sure you knew about it.

I love your description of the national summons. Mighty angels with the Hammer of Truth is a great fit for the Iron Faith. I also agree with your decision to add Sorcery instead of Fire magic. There's no need to steal Marignon's thunder....

I'm a modding doofus, but I think I can read some of the .dm file:
Code:

---

#startfort 3

#swampfort 11

---

Those lines specify that Ulm will get the Fortified City at the capital and a zero-admin Swamp Fort in the swamp, correct? (Lesson for the day: Don't build a castle in the swamp.)

Suggestions for other forts:

• Farmlands: 30-admin Castle (#41)
• Forest: 20-admin Forest Castle (#35)
• Hills: 20-admin Mountain Citadel (#9)
• Other: 20-admin Motte-and-Bailey (#7)

What I really like about this mod is the abundance of tough choices. The combination of high-resource Ulmish units and strong blessing potential makes the player choose carefully when starting the game. Do I go for good scales and a decent blessing, or do I sacrifice scales for a great blessing? And which blessing(s) do I pick? And what about adding magical diversity? You don't have enough points to do everything you want, so you have to choose very carefully.

Great mod, Sombre! I'm looking forward to the next release!