Mod: Sentience

[hEad]

Sentience (with CBM in mind)


This little mod is a simple attempt to introduce a new aspect that will hopefully change some of the standard pretender choices and game strategies. My idea to achieve this is the introduction of a national Gift of Reason spell called Sentience. The image in my mind is that our powerful demi gods would seek to utilize all resources available to achieve dominance and that would include promoting outstanding subjects for greater service.

This new spell gives pretender designers a new decision to make; the magic path for it is not native to any nations mages, so it is a pretender skill that must be paid for at build time, further competing for the precious points that generally go into good scales or a bless.

Because it is created as fundamentally a pretender skill, its use has all the attendant opportunity costs for the pretenders time per turn. So it is not inherently unbalancing, just another arrow in the quiver so to speak.

The Sentience spell is available at Ench 0 and on average has 3 levels of a particular magic path and cost 5 gems a pop. It is there to encourage further diversification and availability of potential thugs, which provide further custom options for ones armies. It is not meant to supplant the standard thug complement, merely enhance it, but it does mean that all nations have the opportunity to build thugs from early on in the game.

I have arbitrarily assigned a magic path to the spell for each MA nation based loosely on each nation’s natural mage access. (Mictlan was tough!) This could be further tweaked as they may line up with classic favored bless paths for a nation – incurring little relative costs, so any input would be very welcome.

The gem costs could be altered depending on the perceived strength of each nation for a further balance.

Nation Path
Arco A3
Ermor A4
Pythium N4
Man E2
Ulm N2
Marignon N3
Mictlan D4
Tien Chi D3
Machaka B2
Agartha B2
Abysia D3
Caelum E3
Ctis E3
Pangaea S3
Vanheim N3
Jotunheim A4
Bandar log A3
Shinuyama B3
Ashdod A5
Atlantis N3
R'leyh N3
Oceania S2
Eriu S3


The idea of this mod is to just mix the pot a bit in terms of summons and thug usage and to expand the potential thug pool open to players, inherently opening up new avenues for strategy and scheming.

Hopefully someone will give it a shot and provide some discussion.

[HoneyBadger]

I like it. I like it a lot.

I'm all for making our Pretenders more important and special, and this seems like it would go a long way towards fulfilling that purpose.

Yeah, I think the typical pathing choices for Pretender builds should be extensively researched, and a lot of testing should be done to make the costs for this as balanced as possible, but I think this could have the potential to add a whole new dimension to MP.

One thing I'd like you to consider is that, if some Pretenders have this power, the ones that don't may have other strengths/abilities that could balance against this. I realize that there's a cost in points, but if there's a choice to make, say, a Dagon with the "sentience" ability, then Dagons without it might have better stats or additional abilities to compensate. In other words, it wouldn't always have to be a tradeoff in *just* the points involved.

On the flipside of that, there might exist a class of new Pretenders that are specifically "sentiencers", or whatever you want to call it, that either have that ability as their prime ability, or as their only real ability (outside of whatever magic paths they might have).

[chrispedersen]

Problem is you're consuming a *lot* of spells slots out of a very limited number available.

[hEad]

Originally Posted by HoneyBadger

I like it. I like it a lot.

I'm all for making our Pretenders more important and special, and this seems like it would go a long way towards fulfilling that purpose.

Yeah, I think the typical pathing choices for Pretender builds should be extensively researched, and a lot of testing should be done to make the costs for this as balanced as possible, but I think this could have the potential to add a whole new dimension to MP.

One thing I'd like you to consider is that, if some Pretenders have this power, the ones that don't may have other strengths/abilities that could balance against this. I realize that there's a cost in points, but if there's a choice to make, say, a Dagon with the "sentience" ability, then Dagons without it might have better stats or additional abilities to compensate. In other words, it wouldn't always have to be a tradeoff in *just* the points involved.

On the flipside of that, there might exist a class of new Pretenders that are specifically "sentiencers", or whatever you want to call it, that either have that ability as their prime ability, or as their only real ability (outside of whatever magic paths they might have).

I totally agree that this has the potential to open up MP in new and damn fun ways - encouraging more summon usage and thug diversity.

Perhaps a good way to go about this would be to find out what the typical bless nations are in MA and what those typical blesses are..

I'll have to go a looking to see how one goes about modding actual pretenders - but having pretenders that have the sentience ability would be the best option - having scentience as an actual pretender skill, like summon allies for instance, would ensure that it stayed a pretender ability and not leveraged in to by a nations mages later on.

Originally Posted by chrispedersen

Problem is you're consuming a *lot* of spells slots out of a very limited number available.

Ok. How dificult then would it be to mod the actual pretenders to have this as a specific skill devoid of magic picks? As Honeybadger alluded to, this would be the best means to introduce a scentience capability ensuring it stays strictly a pretender option.

[Trumanator]

This sounds very useful. Could allow TC for example to leverage its forging w/out putting death on its pretender, by "sentiencing" its celestial summons for ex.

[hEad]

A quick question, do all the Nations have at least one national only pretender? If so, then as a start perhaps this chasis could be a focal point for creating a sentiencing specialist.. (Where would one find the unit numbers for these pretendes?)

What i am thinking is giving this chasis H4 + the required path to the level, then altering the costs of adding new paths pertaining to overall national strenght. This way, you could control access to the spell as definately pretender only. Man and Ulm for eg could have access to a cheap national rainbow sentiencer, whilst Ashdod has to take a expensive limited one.

This should enable lower amounts of the spell slots needed...6 nations need access to nature for sentience for example, so they could all share this spell in the Mod (or 3 of them, if #restricted only allows for 3 nations to use it) This would cut down on hogging slots per Chris' observation.

Would holy on a pretender be an issue? I don't see why the pretender shouldn't have access to this path - i mean if your god can't bless you, who should be able to?

[hEad]

I've just opened up CBM and found a handy list of all pretenders. So short of going through each nation in game to find out, is there a handy list available that lets you know what nation has what unique national pretender?

Thinking about it a bit more, wouldn't it make sence for pretenders to have access to H5 magic? I mean in all seriousness, shouldn't the pretender be the holiest of all a nations units?

Anyways, i'm going to experiment with a pretender making it H5 + required magic for a sentience chasis.

[llamabeast]

The pretender is not given holy magic for what Kristoffer considered thematic reasons. However, I don't see that it would be a terrible thing to give them holy magic.

You could just give all pretenders H5, and make only a single Sentience spell, as a H5 spell. That would be very much simpler than alternative plans (and simple -> likely to be good).

Of course, only pretenders with magic could actually cast it (pure priests have no "Cast ritual spell" option). I don't think that would be a bad thing though.

[llamabeast]

I just tested, you can give a pretender H5 no problems (make sure you give him #holy too). He can never be blessed though (a good thing).

Ok. How dificult then would it be to mod the actual pretenders to have this as a specific skill devoid of magic picks? As Honeybadger alluded to, this would be the best means to introduce a scentience capability ensuring it stays strictly a pretender option.

You can't do that.

So short of going through each nation in game to find out, is there a handy list available that lets you know what nation has what unique national pretender?

Edi's database may help (it is a must for all modding efforts). Other than that, no.

[hEad]

Just what i was up to this little while!! This is a far more efficient way of doing things..

#modname "Pretender Sentience"
#description "Pretenders with the Sentience ability."
#domversion 3.21
-icon "TBA.tga"

#newspell
#copyspell "Gift of Reason"
#name "Sentience"
#descr "Allows the prentender to grant sentience to a unit."
#path 0 3
#path 1 8
#school 4
#researchlevel 0
#pathlevel 0 1
#pathlevel 1 5
#fatiguecost 100
#end

-Great Enchantress
#selectmonster 485
#holy
#magicskill 1 1
#magicskill 8 5
#end

This is a far more efficient way of doing it and it only take up one spell slot.

Now, what would this kind of pretender look like? Would it be available to everyone? What nations should have access to a Great Enchantress Sentiencer?