Cooperative play mod: BFF Thread - Dominions 3: The Awakening

Here's a mod to enable cooperative play between nations, closer to Axis-and-Allies style. By default the game does not support things like allowing allied nations to cross your territory or participate in your battles, but it's possible to mod a remote spell to charm an entire army, which allows you to swap armies/commanders with your allies.

Now YOU TOO can have an army of Pegasus Riders led by a Dis from Helheim!

Link: (sorry Desura won't let me turn it into a real link until I've been registered here for 7 days. See below).

Limitations:
1.) You can't swap commanders that are inside of a fort.
2.) It takes a turn of mage-time and army-time, and wipes out any PD in the province.
3.) There's no way to prevent the AI from using this spell without more modding, so AIs have to be banned from games using this mod.
4.) You can't swap prophets or pretenders. If you swap an army when your prophet or pretender is with it, there will be a fight. Don't do this.

The way it works is that any mage can cast the "New Chain of Command" spell, which sends a Grigori who casts a battlefield-wide H9 Charm spell that is practically unresistible (have to make 100 MR checks). The Grigori has only 1 HP and is diseased, so he goes away at the end of the turn.

-Max

[Mod text below: will edit this away once Desura lets me post a link]

#modname "BFF"
#description "Ennable cooperative play between nations. Use the H1 remote spell 'New Chain of Command' to take control of allied armies. Using it on enemies is cheating."

#newspell
#name "New Chain of Command"
#descr "Send a couple of Grigori to reorganize an allied army. Using this on enemies is cheating."
#fatiguecost 0
#school 0
#path 0 0
#pathlevel 0 1
#researchlevel 0 
#effect 10037
#damage 91
#end

#newspell
#copyspell "New Chain of Command"
#path 0 1
#end

#newspell
#copyspell "New Chain of Command"
#path 0 2
#end

#newspell
#copyspell "New Chain of Command"
#path 0 3
#end

#newspell
#copyspell "New Chain of Command"
#path 0 4
#end

#newspell
#copyspell "New Chain of Command"
#path 0 5
#end

#newspell
#copyspell "New Chain of Command"
#path 0 6
#end

#newspell
#copyspell "New Chain of Command"
#path 0 7
#end

#newspell
#name "Reorganize army"
#descr "Grigori uses this spell to reorganize the army under new leadership"
#range 0
#school 5
#path 0 8
#pathlevel 0 9
#researchlevel 0
#aoe 666
#effect 29
#fatiguecost 0
#nreff 100
#end

#selectmonster 91
#clear
#copyspr 1
#name "Grigori"
#hp 1
#prot 40
#diseasecloud 1
#magicskill 8 10
#end

Edited by: wilsonmax

Dropbox.com

link to what was in text window above put in a text file I labeled BFF.dm
put it in your mods folder and see what happens...

Thanks, yu.gnomi.

To create a link, you highlight a piece of your new text, then the link button above becomes active.

@Maerlande, Desura pops up a message that says something like, "Because you have been registered less than seven days, you can't post URLs." This applies even if I don't make it a link or even type H_T_T_P_:_/_/. It's an anti-spam feature.

Ahhh. I didn't know about that. I just remember having a bugger of a time making links till I sorted that part out.

This is an interesting mod concept. If I get my spectator game going, I'd be willing to put it in for testing. I need to think about this more and figure out if there are other features which would be helpful. I have no vote at this time.

It might be helpful if you ironed out how to get it to work in a limited way. Then put it in as an unused option

Such as, if you could make it work only for switch from nation 1 to nation 2.
The leave the line in but rem'd out so that people could easily see how to make a version for a particular game that only allowed switching units between team members or allies

Edited by: gp1628

Not possible unfortunately. There's no way to mod a spell to only work on one other nation. The only thing you can do is restrict who can cast the spell, via #restricted tag on the spell. If you were playing SP with Ea Arco and Helheim vs a bunch of AIs, you could set the spell to be castable only by Arco and Helheim as per below. You'd have to update the mod every time you started a new game though.

I don't see that as a big issue though. The metagame can handle obvious and flagrant cheating. Just boot the cheater from the game and steal the army right back.

#newspell
#name "New Chain of Command"
#descr "Send a couple of Grigori to reorganize an allied army. Using this on enemies is cheating."
#restricted 0
#restricted 16
#fatiguecost 0
#school 0
#path 0 0
#pathlevel 0 1
#researchlevel 0 
#effect 10037
#damage 91
#end

Edited by: wilsonmax

It's nice to have the option to play with this, but I think I'd prefer to just play team games with the restrictions of the basic game - this way I think getting diversity (both in units and magic) is more limited and also in line more with what you'd get in other gametypes.

Of course, this is also a new thing to consider - how to form a team? One guy with great scales and great sacreds, while giving an ally with thrash scales a great bless to utilize them with? As just one really basic method. But, until I'd get bored of the usual style teamgame I'd rather stick to those, without really needing to think of all the crazy synergies you'd have to think of to utilize this fully.

Team games are rare and hard. I"m all for any way to make them more common and more fun. But no mod can resolve the biggest challenge. You need to be able to talk to you team mate many times per turn. IRC is the bestest. Email is great too.

Either I misread the poll or it's changed. I love to play team games so I voted.

I think it was a good choice to not try and write into the game everything everyone wanted. Instead its a samll enough footprint that it should play well with any program you want running at the same time. Very flexible.

A private chat room definitely helps.
Or a voice channel like Skype or TeamTalk might be fun. Kinda like playing xbox.
Personally if a team game was going a long time Id arrange a shared whiteboard page. I think it would be a big help to have single copy of the map that we can all scribble onto with circles and arrows and notes about who is where.

(but Im worse than any of that. Im spoiled. I have multiple monitors and multiple servers on a business quality internet pipe with multiple IPs)

Edited by: gp1628

The poll didn't change.

It's cool if not everyone is interested. I mostly did this mod as a programming exercise to see if it was possible.