[NewClass] Matriarch Thread - Conquest of Elysium 3

A new class I made for Conquest of Elysium 3: the Matriarch. You can download it from Mediafire or this link at coe3.proboards.com.

I felt the Weed resource was underutilized, so I came up with another concept that uses farms / Hoburg Villages as a primary resource (though I took it in a bit of a different direction...). Not 100% sure on the balance, but I think it's close. I have a couple other classes done, so I'll probably finish testing and polishing those and post them over the next few weeks.

The class uses sumpower between 70000 and 70099. The sprites are based on Dominions 3 sprites, so credit goes to Kristoffer Osterman.

I welcome balance suggestions, feature ideas (though I don't want to overcomplicate things), and especially bug reports.

The battle for Elysium wakes the Matriarch of Primeval Terrors from her slumber. She sees that the fleshy food-races aspire to dominance and is displeased. She calls to her chittering spawn and the clutches of eggs begin to quiver.

The Matriarch can draw the spiders of Elysium to her cause, but the true power of children must be awoken through the consumption of flesh. The spiders' favorite food-race is the Hoburg, and the Overseers are adept at breeding the halflings for their flesh. An Overseer that feasts deeply enough will become a Broodmother, ever-bloated to the point of immobility with spiderling eggs. Broodmothers brook no competition, and if two ever share the same Hoburg farm one will soon devour the other.

The Matriarch herself is a dangerous spellcaster and occasionally lays eggs which hatch into magical progeny. If the Matriarch is ever slain an egg from her clutch will eventually hatch into a new spider queen.

The spiders make use of food-race disciples to attend to the spiders or serve as host bodies for travel. Upon entering combat, spiders will burst out the host and are strengthed by the blood. Of course this is nearly always fatal for the host.

Abilities:
Matriarch is Immortal and sometimes spawns non-leader spellcasters.
Overseers can convert farms to Hoburg Villages to collect Flesh (the weed resource).
One Flesh is also collected from each graveyard each turn.
Overseers can use Flesh to become immobile Broodmothers in a Hoburg Village.
Broodmothers spawn free spiderlings, and cannot share a Hoburg Village.
Broodmothers can use Flesh to summon powerful spiders.
Summoning spiders has a chance to depopulate a Hoburg Village.
Worshipful Hosts are extremely cheap leaders, but usually cannot survive a fight.

Edited by: BrianKB

WOW.
There is a lot of play in that. A lot to discover. It feels awfully powerful with so many ways to get new units.

Im playing it now. It teams well with nations like Baron altho I havent tested the AI portion yet to see if it plays the race well.

Looks interesting. I might have to fire it up and try it out. Cheers

How are Broodmothers supposed to get to graveyards in order to 'engorge on corpses' if they can't move? (or does depopulating a village cause it to become a graveyard?)

It's not well explained in the mod but yes, depopulating a village makes it into a graveyard, which is the only way to engorge a Broodmother.

If you are still working on this mod and accepting feedback I have noticed a few things and I will try to mention them as I find them. The main thing I noticed is that graveyards do not show what they give to the spiders, I do not know if it is because it's to hard to force the game to show that (or impossible) but if it isn't it would be nice to see it. Also, I assume the chance of depopulating a village isn't very high, but I have been playing for 17 in game years (normal months so 204 turns) and none of my villages have depopulated. I do not know if this is amazing luck or if the function isn't working. Other than this the mod is amazing and I look forward to testing it more indepth with my friends online!

The only thing that might be possible is showing a message "A corpse was harvested from a graveyard" or so.

If i remeber correctly from the mod file, the probability is equal to weed spent for summoning. So if for 40 weed a spider hulk is summoned its 40% chance for turning it into graveyard. And if in a village no summonings are cast, they cannot turn into graveyard.

What i dislike slightly about the mod, is the need to guard graveyards. Because if a graveyard is conquered and the immobile spider there killed, there is no way to place another spieder there. And any solution i can think about causes other problems.

Only problem is I spent 80 weed for several months straight (double spider hulk) and never got a graveyard. I guess I just need to keep trying. What do you get from the graveyard spawns anyway?

IIRC, the graveyard spawns much nastier spiders to make up for not gaining as many resources.