[NewClass]Guildmaster Thread - Conquest of Elysium 3

Please find a link to my new class mod, The Guildmaster.

Created for v3.11 (although you will need to save and load to see summoning correctly, as with everything in 3.11).

Reserves sumpow 115000 to 117999. Thanks to all the original artists upon whose work I have built.


Dl.dropbox.com

The Guildmaster leads an ambitious and industrious city of civilians who want to 'conquer' Elysium using productivity, niceness and superior double-entry accounting. They specialise in defence of their settlements, and also build improvements in them and the surrounding terrain. Their cities consist of many peoples working together, including humans, dwarves, elves and hoburgs. Their superior productivity gives them a fantastic uplift in money production compared to others.

Unfortunately, their troops, militia mainly, are ok in defence, but terrible in attack, and every unit they purchase will cost them at least 1 gold per turn to maintain. Mercenary forces of men, elves, dwarves and hoburgs will occasionally turn up looking for work, but these will cost even more to maintain.

Picture 1 - Guild Troops huddling behind their defensive walls for protection from people with nasty weapons and evil intent.

The guilds bring great defensive strength and the ability to exploit the terrain of Elysium.

Key resources that can be collected include:

Wood : Represented by Herbs
Iron : Iron
Coal : Represented by Rubies
Stone : Represented by Emeralds
Diamonds : Diamonds
Steel : Represented by Sapphires
Food : Represented by Weed

Picture 2 - A typical early exploitation pattern for an expanding guild city. Lumberjacks and sawmills have been established in the forests and an Ancient Forest, and timber is being ferried to various parts of the guild territory for defensive works. A flour mill has been established on one of the farms, leading to the establishment of a bakery in the city. To the South of the city a Coal mine has been expanded, a stone quarry established and even a winery opened to cater for the discerning Hoburg folk in town.

There are also a range of other 'second class' resources, such as flour, horses, timber and many others, which can be created by your buildings.

There is a way to get some troops that don't require maintenance...alcohol.

Picture 3 - A fishing village has also been established on the coast, giving additional gold production.

A significant navy can be built, but the terrain rarely requires or allows it. Building additional housing within one of your cities will bring more citizens. These normally provide a small gold contribution in taxes, although some don't, and sometimes useful specialists will emerge.

Wood can be turned into defensive palisades, and stone into defensive walls with terrific strength. Both can be enhanced with a moat when placed around cities.

Picture 4 - An armory in town allows knights to be hired (using Steel made from suitable metals from the mines) and a stables allows horses to be made, mounting knights.

Tactical advice:
Expand and take gold producing sites, which count double. Careful of attacking anything tough...your troops are flimsy. Enlist a forester within the first few turns so that you can start to collect wood from the forests. It will be very handy and is the foundation of the economy for a while. Then depending on the terrain, enlist a Miner, Farmer (now your collecting all resources) and Builder.

What happens next depends on what terrain is around and how you want to play. I find that putting up a lot of defensive walls will deter the enemy very strongly from attacking, and rightly so, but it is hard to collect the resources you need while huddling behind walls. One good army will have to be built.

If you have steel in abundance (blue gems), then think about an Armory (wood from an Ancient Forest) or a stables. If you have lots of Stone, build the larger stone buildings and then start on defensive walls. I've tried a Maginot Line tactic, and the AI went around it, so only try if there is a real choke point. If you have coal (red gems), then extend a coal mine, create coal and start a dwarven forge in town. That gives you artillery and other things, which can be handy in defence and attack. Diamonds can be mined and bring nobles to town, enhancing gold production.

There are a LOT of other capabilities...experiment.

I hope you have half as much playing it as I had creating it. I'd appreciate any feedback or suggestions.

And thanks again to Illwinter for creating this cool game.

VERY interesting creative use of the limits of the game.
So cool!

well i know where the building graphics come from . It's a nice idea, I like it. Building a sawmill in an AF, lol.

I did something similar, too, with walls and gates. Too bad you can't force the game to allow only one unit type in a certain place, but I saw you posted this in the feature request thread. I had the same wishes for uniques like u did, so thx for posting them .

Interesting... I can see what you're getting at, and it's a cool concept, but the lack of ritual names REALLY bones the whole mod. I have no idea of what any of this is supposed to be doing, and blundering my way through the list isn't helping much. Any chance you could put together a quick list of what all the spells are supposed to be?

as TBShunter mentions above you have to save and reload for ritualnames to appear.

I can see your frustration. Definitely, as ulius4 says, save and reload and you see the ritualnames. Even I can't play it without them. That still leaves the various mastery names as a bit of a mystery as to what they do, but most times you will guess.

I will also work on a list of resources and buildings at some point. The resource and chains of actions are probably quite convoluted and confusing (if your not me!).

Ah. Missed that little caveat; you should emphasize that better. But yeah, it totally works after a save/load, and that does help.

Even with the ritual names working, though, it'd still be helpful to have a listing of what does what. Trying at this mod, I often have moments like "cool, that's a fairly decent sapphire mine I just captured, though I guess that's supposed to be steel... but which of my guys is supposed to be making use of that?" Also, "okay, so I need some specific terrain to build a quarry; be nice to know which sort of terrain'.

Also... you might want to tweak the mercenaries a little. Just got an offer for 50 Dwarven Mercenary Fighters for 952 Gold and 500 Iron. Those are improbably large figures.

Edited by: Endovior

LOL. I thought the dwarves would be a confounding situation. The likelihood that anybody saves 500 Iron and 500-1000 gold is indeed small. But if you do, and they appear, they would be pretty damn useful! There are lots of smaller groups appear.

The steel can be used by two buildings. The Armorer will allow you to build steel clad (foot) knights. To build it, you will need a sawmill in an Ancient Forest to build the appropriate timber. The Grand Master of Knights will allow the recruitment of mounted steel knights. To attract him, you will need to build a large stone building and have horses, which can be produced at a stables, which can be created by the farmer on a Savannah (phew!).

Quarries can be produced on any mountain. The terrain will normally show, but when you use the 'table 10' entries like 'any mountain', they don't show up on the tooltip.

Got it. So in other words, since I haven't found an Ancient Forest or a Savannah yet, I can't use the steel. Good to know.

More perplexing is the Warehouse and Shipping Box. Having moved my builder up to the nearby mountains to produce a quarry, I've shipped back stone and set up a warehouse... and then spent some wood to make a slow non-commander unit with no attacks that sits in the back row. So, uh... now what? It's not a commander, so I have no clue where to go from there.

The Warehouse provides some trade and gold. It produces shipping boxes which each produce 1 trade. Produce enough trade and you start to be very versatile about what to turn your gold into (or wood, whatever).

Ah, gotcha. Trade bonus is one of those benefits that doesn't show up directly, so I couldn't at all tell what that was supposed to be doing. Good to know.

Yes, a little icon to show trade or iron bonuses that monsters provide would be good. You can of course check your trade total before and after it appears to confirm (but it is a bit obscure). Same with the occasional dwarven miner that appears as a citizen (and gives +1 Iron).

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I've noticed that the poisoner does not work (he doesn't get summoned in the version published). I've fixed him in the next build.

Main update will come with 3.12, which brings significant new capabilities.

I just come to thank you for this awesome mod. Fantastic use of game limits! Too bad i got it only yesterday.

Glad you enjoyed it and very happy to receive feedback.

I am working on another version for 3.12 and beyond, so any suggestions you have are welcome. There are quite a few new possibilities with 3.12, so I am trying to extend it further.

Cheers

FYI, im playing old version on 3.12, works fine.

Guildmaster is a lot of fun, are you still working on it?

I had sort of stopped for a while, because there was so little activity here. Since there is now more, I may continue to develop it. My priority with it is to improve the flexibility of resources. For example, if you can harvest some wood, that wood should have lots of potential uses, depending on where it goes and ends up. At the moment, because there were some limitations in promotions, I couldn't do that, but now I can (post 3.12).

When I get time

Anything in particular you would like to see with it?

Nice to see you are active again. I have played a couple of full games with them and like them a lot, so far I have a few comments.

In my experience they seem to be very strong vs. other humans, with diplomats and orators pretty much decimating other human armies. At the same time I have big troubles with other classes, espescially demons. In an ideal world, I think that they should maybe be a bit less strong vs humans and stronger vs demons, but I am not sure how easy that is to accomplish. Note that I have only played around 5 games, others may even disagree.

Also, is there a reason why steelclad knights are «rearpos»? It seems very counterproductive, since they cannot attack from rank 2 and this makes them hard to use with units that do. I just removed «rearpos» from my c3m, but I can change it back, if it is intended.

Hmmm, I am not sure what I was thinking? Maybe that they stay behind walls...no good having them if the knights sit in front of them? Then again, maybe knights would do that, take to the field and all?

How to make them stronger against non-humans, and weaker against humans? Hmmm....

Aha, I see. Well I think you would need a lot of walls before that became a problem. I feel that the knights are a bit like mobile walls anyway. The ability to attack over them with pikemen and helbardiers (which is an awesome tactic) is stronger than the rare case of not losing knights because they push a wall or two to rank 2.

I have not started to build a lot of walls, as I mainly get field battles anyway. Right now I am playing against the Knight difficulty (so you know the level I'm at). I feel this game is not that good for turtling, because of the large area you need to defend and the seemingly superior «stack of doom» conquering tactic - building a strongest possible stack - that the AI tend to use. I feel that to beat it, I just need a (mobile) bigger/better stack and tend to put all my resources into that.

From my experience, the AI seem unwilling to attack superior forces, hence turtling seem like a failed tactic - you would just allow the enemy to attack around you
if you concentrated your effort, or become overextented if you didn't. I'd be interested if someone is able to play a more turtling strategy though, by having strong defence using walls. In terms of gameplay I guess I'm still a newbie in this game.

May I suggest adding armorcrafting to the mod? It would go well with the theme I think. The different armor pieces - body armor, helmet, boots and gauntlets would give minor boosts to HP, maybe the body armor could give +1 to AR. The idea is craftable non-magic armor, that would be afforable. It is important that it's not too strong, it should be weaker than magic armor. It would give a minor boost to end-game with these guys, which should be fine.

Edited by: eolsnes