The Legion of D'Tesh (Civilization Module)

[deadliver]

I like the idea of having flaming horsemen (or at least flaming hoofed mounts) that can negatively affect the terrain they ride over. An a-hole version of Raider.

 

[Guybrush!]

Just had a hotseat game (well, not a whole one.) with a friend, with me as D'tesh, and him as Doviello. Found our that the Obsidian Spire grants 3 tile city radius, workers convert things into deserts and KotE removes unhappyness and unhealthyness, we promptly decided we should restart and I adjusted my strategy.
We played with these settings:
Noble, normal speed, large map, 16 players, double events, temperate with medium sea level, and advance start.
I started in a large open grassland with a river, and used my advance start points for a 4 size city and 4 watchers, as I wanted to quickly improve my bigger city radius. I researched cartography first, as I wanted to see if the stooges get the slave capturing promos. Built 6 warriors for defense (accursed 2 strength!), and spammed graveyards onto every tile I owned.
Started building the stooges and researched horseback riding. When horseback riding was done, I started to go for KotE. I found the stooges could capture slaves, and used them and a stack of warriors to win an easy war with the hippus, who I captured a couple of cities from, and got my city to size 14. I was unhappy when I found out I couldn't get promotions on my units though.
Meanwhile, my friend, realising I was a growing threat, started to roll all the civs between us using a stack of 3 mammoths, 3 elite horsemen, and lucian.
I quickly researched archery, and camped up my city.
By the time he got to me, it was roughly turn 100 - 120ish, and I had a size 16 megacity, producing 100 science and vast ammounts of hammers every turn. And when he found out his 8 strength mammoth riders with combat V and shock II had a 39.4 chance of victory on the giants in my city (which was producing archers every turn), he gave up and said I cannot play D'tesh against him anymore, way overpowered. And thats with one source of death mana.
So my impression of the civ is awesome and unique, but perhaps too powerfull. Maybe they aren't overpowered and I should just put the difficulty up for early wars. Not sure how to balance them if they are though.

 

[Valkrionn]

Haha, since you were playing FFPlus if you had Mammoths, you should have told him to hold on until Divine essence, and start spawning Cave Bears..... A full strength pack is like 27 strength.

 

[far_wanderer]

Haha, since you were playing FFPlus if you had Mammoths, you should have told him to hold on until Divine essence, and start spawning Cave Bears..... A full strength pack is like 27 strength.

Or send in High Priests of Leaves to summon Treants. My one chance to play the Legion so far (also in FF+) taught me that things which are immune to death damage destroy you utterly and without mercy. I started next to the Scions (fortunately I recognized the threat and dealt with them while they were still depending on Centeni), focused on the Arcane line, and then got utterly wiped out by a single Gargoyle.

Aside from the glaring overdependence on death damage, the Legion seems really cool, and I look forward to trying them out again. Those invisible scouts are crazily awesome. One thing I'd suggest adding: you've got these cool graveyards to build on flatlands, but no similarly spooky looking improvement for hills.

 

[Deon]

Like... Haunted mines?

 

[Milaga]

Like... Haunted mines?

The words "zoinks" and "jinkees" come to mind.

 

[Valkrionn]

From the FFPlus thread......

Slight problem with the Legion of D'Tesh: the Council of Four is not actually available. Some quick research revealed that this was because they were listed as UNITCLASS_MAGE, the same as Chosen of D'Tesh. Changing this to UNITCLASS_ARCHMAGE fixed the problem.

 

[Quetz]

This managed to catch my attention. Fun game so far as them; I'm getting even with Keelyn for what she did to me last game (several turns from Ascension and... bang, 90% Hell!) and I'm loving their "slash and burn" play style. The Scions are an interesting subversion of the usual evil shambling undead horde, and I love them for that but... evil shambling undead hordes can be fun.
But I was always a bit iffy about using Doviello diplo music, and while playing my Soundtrack of Doom offered up something that, while pretty far opposite of the Doviello theme, might make good diplo music for them: Burning Man from the World of Goo soundtrack. (Attached in a .rar; use it or don't as you feel fit.)
EDIT: Alternatively, I'd suggest the Baator theme from Planescape: Torment (also attached). I like Burning Man for non-traditional-ness, but I figured it might be a bit too eclectic a choice.
And I modified their color scheme to Dark Lemon (chosen basically at random from unused colors) on account of not wanting to mistake my soldiers for wandering demons. Fiddle with the color schemes; if you don't change the main color from black, at least change the secondary from white.

Ahhh.. World of Goo was such an awesome game, and it had such an awesome soundtrack too... definately support that song for diplo music. That or the song "Screamer"....

 

[Milaga]

So last night I got through about 200 turns of a nice game. I really like this civ, it's a refreshing change in how you play. It's not about building a civilization, but rather an army of undead (and a corp of slave plot workers.)

Apart from the fact that they are dangerously fragile in the early game, they are tremendously powerful. A few comments:
* Assassins. Very overpowered. They are basically shadows available with Poisons and without needed CoE. Considering that you probably will have several scouts with Combat V, once you can upgrade them to Assassins you will have a pretty devastating stack, especially considering they are pretty much immune to retaliation. I think they need to lose the invisibility, or at least make it drop on combat. I personally think only scouts should have this ability.
* There's no reason to go down the melee line. I picked up the archer line early and never regretted it. Using archers to soften up defenders, sending in summoned skeletons as fodder then using my assassins to close the deal. Getting archers also solves the problem of having weak city defenders who rely on death damage. It's not unusual to have 200% defense in the capital with walls, palisade and fletcher. Add an archery range and a City Defense III archers and your capital is pretty much unassailable. Archers should also have the wretched promotion that the melee line has.
* I'm not sure I understand why the arcane line needs an additional level to upgrade. I thought they were going to be my important units but I haven't really needed them.
* Graveyards are too good. I think when I hit Arcane Lore I was getting 53 per tile? Considering the number of tiles I can work is limited only by the number of slaves I can harvest, this can turn even the smallest cities into a production powerhouse. I think the hammer and commerce bonus for desert needs to be dropped as it doesn't seem necessary.

All and all they are a very unique civ to play, I definitely enjoy them.

In my game I just finished up a rather satisfying raid on Elohim lands. I took in four assassins, four adepts and four archers. I managed to take four cities, including their capital, and strip their populations before retreating to let them retake and rebuild. I didn't lose a single unit. I've now got my sights on the Luichirp, although they seem to have an army of slingers that might make things a little more challenging.

 

[Mailbox]

From the FFPlus thread......

Fixed it, surprised that no one found it before now. I guess the legion is too powerful early on.

So last night I got through about 200 turns of a nice game. I really like this civ, it's a refreshing change in how you play. It's not about building a civilization, but rather an army of undead (and a corp of slave plot workers.)

Apart from the fact that they are dangerously fragile in the early game, they are tremendously powerful. A few comments:
* Assassins. Very overpowered. They are basically shadows available with Poisons and without needed CoE. Considering that you probably will have several scouts with Combat V, once you can upgrade them to Assassins you will have a pretty devastating stack, especially considering they are pretty much immune to retaliation. I think they need to lose the invisibility, or at least make it drop on combat. I personally think only scouts should have this ability.

I'm going to give the Silence of Death promotion a -50% str penalty. That should make the recon line just that, the recon line.

* There's no reason to go down the melee line. I picked up the archer line early and never regretted it. Using archers to soften up defenders, sending in summoned skeletons as fodder then using my assassins to close the deal. Getting archers also solves the problem of having weak city defenders who rely on death damage. It's not unusual to have 200% defense in the capital with walls, palisade and fletcher. Add an archery range and a City Defense III archers and your capital is pretty much unassailable. Archers should also have the wretched promotion that the melee line has.

I'm thinking of changing the way the wretched promotion works altogether, perhaps just a strength penalty

* I'm not sure I understand why the arcane line needs an additional level to upgrade. I thought they were going to be my important units but I haven't really needed them.

The arcane line should be the most important line. I obviously need to fine tune it.

* Graveyards are too good. I think when I hit Arcane Lore I was getting 53 per tile? Considering the number of tiles I can work is limited only by the number of slaves I can harvest, this can turn even the smallest cities into a production powerhouse. I think the hammer and commerce bonus for desert needs to be dropped as it doesn't seem necessary.

I like the hammer and commerce bonus for desert because it encourages its spread. I can tone down graveyards though, the commerce bonus is unnecessary.

 

[Valkrionn]

Yeah, I would probably keep the pyre for commerce and the graveyard for hammers.

 

[Milaga]

The arcane line should be the most important line. I obviously need to fine tune it.

I like the hammer and commerce bonus for desert because it encourages its spread. I can tone down graveyards though, the commerce bonus is unnecessary.

I don't think that there's so much wrong with the arcane line as much as the recon line was too powerful. A strength penalty might work as well, but I still think invisible assassins picking off traveling units and workers behind enemy lines with no chance of retaliation is a pretty powerful mid-early game ability.

There's no real need to encourage the spread of deserts since it happens automatically. After my first game I never used slaves for improvements because a) they escape b) I need them working city plots and c) they work so durn slow. So any plot I worked with a watcher became desert before I could even finish a road on it. It's already a pretty nice bonus that you can destroy most resources and burn the lands. Even if you do lose a city, it's most likely going to be more of a burden than a boon to it's captors.

I didn't even mention their GP economy potential. Early on it's pretty easy to get a bunch of GP slots. And since I didn't need the I ran a rather nice Civ combo ... Godking/Pacifism/Slavery/Conquest . Maybe a GP penalty of 50% is in order to counteract the double GP slots you get from buildings. It might be interesting to have to make a decision whether or not to give up the hammers you get on plots for GP in order to get or . Besides, I really don't see many Great Ghouls out there.

The biggest problem I see is that, although they have a considerable number of weaknesses, their production and commerce potential is incredible. If you can survive long enough you're going to be out-teching, out-wondering and out-producing everyone. Still, these dudes are really fun. Nice job, Mailbox.

 

[WarKirby]

I'm going to give the Silence of Death promotion a -50% str penalty. That should make the recon line just that, the recon line.

A strength penalty seems good, but 50% is a bit much. That would cripple assasins and such.

I'd suggest halfing that. -25% is sufficient.


Also, I've run into an issue whilst modding the infernals. It seems you've used infernal artdefines for many dtesh units. This causes a problem when I try to modify infernal units. I feel skeletal warriors don't fit infernals at all, because they're demons, not undead. Dtesh ARE undead, though.


When I replaced the infernal warrior with a Mane Warrior, it also affected the infernals, which is annoying.

I'd suggest you make your own copies of the infernal artdefines, at least for the early undead units:

Settler
Warrior
Scout
Archer

 

[Valkrionn]

Not sure how this hadn't been found yet, but scutarri found a python error in the reqSlaveTradeBuy. You call pPlayer to get the civilization type, but pPlayer is not defined. Need to insert this code:

pPlayer = gc.getPlayer(caster.getOwner())

 

[Vermicious Knid]

Haven't had a chance to play the Legion myself yet....but did face them as an AI-controlled neighbor. The AI can actually play them effectively!


Wiped me the heck out when they finally decided to attack, and in the meantime they seemed to spawn a great person every couple of turns.

 

[Daris]

It.. is fun to play these guys.. just the only thing I worry about while playing as them is, Ashley J. Williams ((Bruce Campbell)) showing up... >.>; Of course being able to construct a strength 24 Phalanx every turn... the Army of Darkness might stand a chance this time..

((I just wish I could get OO and have the Necronomicon in my capital.. wait... World Builder time!!!))

 

[PPQ_Purple]

Could I ask for just 1 favour.
Could anyone make a copy of that .docx saved as a .doc?
I am using the older version of MS office as I hate the x version so I can't read it.

 

[odalrick]

Could I ask for just 1 favour.
Could anyone make a copy of that .docx saved as a .doc?
I am using the older version of MS office as I hate the x version so I can't read it.

No, not as .doc .

You can however have your choice of .rtf (the zip file), .txt and .pdf . All converted with openoffice.org .

 

[PPQ_Purple]

No, not as .doc .

You can however have your choice of .rtf (the zip file), .txt and .pdf . All converted with openoffice.org .

Thanks a tirlion.

 

[Quetz]

A couple things:

Lord D'Tesh doesn't have the Hero promotion. That kind of sucks, since he's the only one they can get and is very late, barring Duin. An early, weaker hero would be nice.

Graveyards are unremovable - ie if you build a Graveyard over top of a mana node, the only way to get rid of it is to have an enemy plunder it or Worldbuilder it away.

D'Tesh can't build Pastures - quite annoying. Maybe because of the auto-desert convert, but in effect they can't get horses on their own. If that's the intent, should just remove the mounted line...

Council of Four thing been mentioned.

Are the D'Tesh ever going to get a worldspell?