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

[Sombre]

- Well marignon is all about purging sinners with fire - they are based on the myth of witch burning and the actions of the catholic inquisition. Ulm Reborn does have an inquisition of sorts, but it's more the kind where,... well,... they lock you up in walking armour and brainwash you. I don't want to give them fire on the mage priests, but I could give them national summon access to fire. Maybe some forge based stuff.

- I thought the starting fort would be the same as LA Ulm's but I guess that got cleared. I find the fort type bit of modding pretty confusing to be honest.. but I'll give them a better starting fort. As for the forts they should build in other places, like forest etc - I'd love suggestions (with the fort type numbers if possible).

- Right now the Black Acolyte is just a cheap way of ferrying troops and they're the only priest that isn't cap only. You're right they're much worse than the black priests (their domsummon is much less frequent) - I'll make them very cheap and stealthy sounds good too.

- The penitent's afflictions are a leftover from the flagellents that they're based on. It wasn't intended and I'll fix it.

- For now I like the freespawning. It frees up the priests to preach and do priesty things. It also encourages dom strength. I'll see in the future if it's too random though.

- They might also have lost Ulm's 20(25?)% prod bonus in all forts. Either way, they're getting a resource boost in the update. They are a cap dwelling nation (their recruitment screen is more than halved outside the cap) so they need it to crank out resources to make up for bad start positions and so on.

- Because there's no mod command for immunity to drain I'd have to copystats something that already had it. That something wouldn't have inquisition bonus and might have other stuff we don't want like armour and weapons. I'll look into getting drain immunity on the white priest and he'll lose the inquisition bonus. It might not be possible to get it right though.

- All 'white' units are getting max age boosts to represent their new lease on life.

Your comments are very helpful, particularly the way you set them out. I'd love to hear more like that.

[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).

[Sombre]

0.5 is up. I think the national summons might not be balanced and the hoch hammer might need to be cheaper and less of a killing machine. I had 4 of them in one squad last game and they racked up a crapload of kills.

0.6 will be balancing changes, maybe add a national hero or two. I might add a penitent farming 'Black Shepherd' commander, or he might be one of the aformentioned national heroes. If you think the nation could really do with something or needs a balancing change please do chime in.

Happy blessings and may the Aufklarung reward ye.

[Sombre]

I'm sticking up v0.6 earlier than anticipated because I found various bugs in playtesting that were pissing me off. I'm hoping there should be less of a tide of penitent in this version, because I've figured out that domsummon didn't work the way I thought it did. In v0.5 you could amass a silly number of them.

Also added a penitent spawning national hero 'The Grey Shepherd'.

[Sombre]

Did you mean 'still 0.5' ?

It's 0.6 now. I was having trouble uploading.