[NewClass] Megalomaniac Thread - Conquest of Elysium 3

New version 1.3 with balance and quality of life changes; lowers unit costs by 10-20%, buffs Knights and Praisesingers, adds an additional summon, and makes it easier to replace your starting commanders.

I also realized I balanced around playing with the less-aggressive-animals mod, so if you don't use that you should use this version which gives statues defense.

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

This concept uses pure area as a resource. The original intention was to be able to claim the plains terrain by summoning resource creating units there, but unfortunately it does not appear possible to restrict a summoning to a plains tile.

I think it starts the power curve starts a little slow but may be too powerful and hard to stop once you're established. Though the fact that that it relies mostly on mundane army units limits the endgame.

The class uses sumpower between 71000 and 71099. 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.

Though once just a simple captain, the Megalomaniac dreamed of greater things. His advisor whispered portents of glory into his ear and he listened, realizing that he is destined for greatness. All will know his image, his name, his might. His deeds and conquest will be legendary and his memory will be eternal. He will be remembered as a god!

The Megalomaniac is fueled by vanity, and seeks to cover Elysium with his likeness so that none will forget his face through all eternity. The mad would-be king has no great strength or magic; his power flows solely from his cult of personality.

The Megalomaniac strives to erect statues all across Elysium. The Megalomaniac or one of his hired stonecarvers can place one (and only one) statue at each parcel of land. Similarly, one monument can be built at every Temple. These structures accrue fame which can be spent to attract followers. With enough fame swelling his ego, the Megalomaniac will even dedicate a temple to himself and claim to be a god!

The Whisperer takes advantage of the ambitions of the Megalomaniac, stoking his vanity and pride and steering his actions in his plot for personal power. He aspires to be the true ruler of a grand empire.

Devoted Fanatics can come in great numbers to serve the Megalomaniac. They loathe fighting under anyone elses command; if forced to they will flee given any provocation.

Zealous Praisesingers will fervently expound on the virtues of the Megalomaniac, and are adept at pulling in converts.

Imposters are lookalikes and body doubles that can lead the Devoted Fanatics with none the wiser.

Abilities:
Can build one statue in each square to earn Fame (the iron resource).
No iron is gained from mines.
The Megalomaniac and his Imposters give a massive morale boost to commanded units, which is often necessary to command Devoted Fanatics.
Whisperers can steer the movement to their own ends and upgrade using Fame.
A sufficiently bold Megalomaniac can use a temple to proclaim himself a god.

Edited by: BrianKB

Cool Concept

A thought: give a lesser amount of leadership to prideful statues, so devoted fanatics and other units that might need the megalomaniac or impostors can be left somewhere for defense. After all, they're fighting to keep something that Dear Leader has claimed as his, they mustn't run away and shame Dear Leader by failing to keep it.

It's not a bad idea. Though in my games with the Megalomaniac morale rolls rarely came up, so I would hesitate to lessen the flavorful drawback of the fanatics.

Have you play-tested him against necromancers? They get all sorts of fear-effects through spells or summoned creatures.

Also, possibly a way to replace the megalomaniac if he's killed would be nice.

Currently playing this. Cool concept. Desperately needs tweaking though.

I played a random era and ended up with around 6 ancient forests in my general vicinity. I don't know if creatures were spawning out of them or just all over the map in general but there were constantly small animal armies appearing all around my territory wiping out my statues as fast as I could put them down. I never even ran into another player in around 5 years so far, thank goodness, because I can barely hold back the constant flow of creatures with this army and the amount of territory I need to protect. I've got a few suggestions that might help make this less frustrating to play.

1. Raise the cost of each statue and give them some sort of ability to defend themselves. We are playing a game that has demons, a self-defending statue should be believeable. This is desperately needed as right now all my time is spent fighting off every 2 deer army that appears in my lands and wrecks these completely defenseless statues.
Alternatively have statues be stronger but only buildable in settlements or maybe mountains or something. Right now defending all valuable structures AND all statue territory EVERYWHERE is too much.
There's no reason a Megalomaniac wouldn't make a statue of himself very large and even godlike in size. Maybe different sizes and strengths of statues could be erected. There's a whole host of things that could be done with this.

edit: While the idea of Statues EVERYWHERE is an interesting concept, it's problematic in practice in a game where every square will be agressively challenged by ranging neutral creatures.

2. Maybe allow Imposters to put up statues or Stonecarvers to carry units or have some ability to not die the moment they are left alone. Or make Stonecarvers cost more like 25g. Since I spend all my time putting up statues with my Mega AND have to wait a long time for decent Fame troops to build up I am both too busy and too weak to make much money. And I'm losing 2-4g per turn building statues that are constantly falling to animals and more time to fighting off those animals and goblins to save my remaining statues. When I do get any gold it's either spent on replacement Stonecarvers or the 8 hp Knights of the Inner Circle.
All this leaves me desperately short of money for any units that do require gold to raise. I lost my mage (Whisperer?) midway through, so I'm not even sure what the consolidation ability was that he had. I had no money for what looked like a lower level replacement Whisper mage when once in a blue moon he was available for sale.

3. Allow the recruiting of something other than Imposters, Praisesingers and Stonecarvers more often. Even if I did have money for some sort of Advisor or Whisperer type unit that might have done something else cool for my race I never saw them in the Recruitment queue. Half of the abilities of this race seem inaccessable for me.

4. End game. Yes this race is quite weak early game. But is their endgame really strong? Their midgame sure seemed still pretty weak, and their armies are constantly split up defending EVERY territory. The best unit I could see to recruit were those 8 hp Knights. Just about any race in the game has better endgame units accept maybe the Senator, and I believe he's quite strong early game to make up for it. Praisesingers can't convert anything other than human units, and there aren't many human units in the game that are at all powerful, so that won't help biuld a lategame force. It seems like Barbarian base units are about as strong as Mega best units. And their statues can fight back and don't have to defend any additional lands. Sure you get Fame units with Mega, but the slow pace of expansion and constant defense of all territory plus not getting normal iron etc etc etc makes up for it I think.

Could we get fewer but stronger Knights in the 20+ hp range? Maybe walking statues, blessings, flying angel followers, devoted beast allies (giant hounds?), etc etc?

In a way Mega also seems like a Baron that has to defend every square and has weak knights.

Edited by: Icarndos

Thanks for the comments!

When I first tested with the Megalomaniac it was way too strong so I kept nerfing the unit costs and quantities until the game was harder. But I may have gone too far. It's worth pointing out that that starting around 6 ancient forests can be rough for a lot of classes.

One major thing that I hadn't considered, was that I play with the mods that make deer and other animals more likely to stay in forests. That makes a huge difference with statue longevity that I balanced around without thinking about it. In fact that alone could make or break the class, hmm. Maybe the appropriate response is a second version of the class for people without those mods that has mountain-only statues that give more resources and cost more. Or giving the statues a defense (I want them to be mundane rather than animated, but I like the sound of giving them an automatic guard of militia that will hold back the random snakes but not larger packs).

The other balance concerns might be unnecessary if statue survival is fixed, but here are some thoughts:

Stonecarvers were made non-leaders to make statue spreading harder since statues give so much free sight and slowing of enemies. Statue price was increased from 1 to 2 to slow the rate you get Stonecarvers and make it less good to get tons of them to slow the polynomial growth of Fame. I could probably leave statue price as it is and decrease Stonecarver price.

The Knights are underwhelming for their cost and some more hp would be good. I could lower unit costs in general back a bit. Maybe Praisesingers should be more generally useful but come off the always recruitable list.

Advisor (which can upgrade to Whisperer) is currently a 5% recruitment chance, which was chosen to be similar to the low recruitment for Necromancer's Apprentices, etc. Though maybe waiting turn after turn for a new apprentice is too frustrating an experience to want to emulate. Maybe that should go up to 8% and the cost down a bit.

Endgame being strong was predicated on having a huge fame income that is hard for your enemies to cut into and thus massive armies. There are a couple of non-mundane endgame options, and a couple of the things you suggested are basically in the class, but you didn't get to experience them.

So I think I'll give statues a modest defense and then a bunch of minor buffs to various unit recruitments and see how that goes. And an expensive way to turn an Imposter to a Megalomaniac as mkire requested (keeping the Megalomaniac as a unique unit).

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Alright, I gave the statues the ability to summon 1-3 spearmen as defenders, buffed Knights to 12 hp, and cut most unit costs by 10-20%. I made Praisesingers more rare, but now they can affect everything. Stonecarvers still cannot lead, but they can get a little defense from the statues now. I doubled the Advisor recruitment rate, and made it possible to promote an Imposter, which should guarantee access to the non-mundane-troops endgame options (which Icarndos didn't get to experience). I also added an additional endgame summon I had been thinking about.

I gave it a test in the Dark Ages era against a couple Knight opponents with the less-aggressive-animals mod off, and it seemed fine. The statues stand up fine to random pairs of animals and clear them off the map, but cannot generally defeat larger groups or tougher mobs, which seems right. The Praisesinger buff is a big boon, with the ability to scoop up low-morale moose, bears etc. (which is why I made it humans only originally, but that is very narrow as it doesn't include hoburgs, dwarves, etc.). I was doing fine into midgame and won the game at that point with an assortment of recruited troops.

Here is the new version for people who don't use less-aggressive-animals. If you do use that mod or something similar, then use this version for the rest of the changes but without statue defense.

Edited by: BrianKB

Thank you for the imposter to mega thing