Ivory Towers and You.

battlefield middle earth II had ivory towers (actually called that too) but i like.

Because cities (at least according to some old post) were supposed to be specialized, I suggest that the sovreign should improve A LOT the bonus given by whatever city he is in. So that the city with a wizard tower (or THE wizard tower if there is only one) could be the one improving magic, while the city with let's say the "central bank" could be improving the income... That way wizards would have a reason to move around or choose a specific bonus. Anyway I agree leaders should not be encouraged to travel like a common knight. (Just in order to annoy a few people, let me point out that such idea would obviously be spoiled once again, like most aspects of the game, by teleport)

Still this game needs lots of different strategies in order to work. There shouldn't be just ONE military strategy (IE keeping the leader in a large weapon factory to get the best weapons and such...). Take inspiration from games like Age of Wonders, where the terrain plays a major role: armies should be differentiated, by having skills that allow them to cross specific terrains or which allow the army they travel with, to do that ...by being invisible when surrounded by trees etc...

Movement is the key to strategy, don't ever think that movement is secondary to fight: when a battle takes place things are pretty much set anyways since the winner can be anticipated most of the times: strategy is mostly about getting units to the right place at the right time.

Thanks Black, I am glad someone read this. 

I totally agree about placement being key to victory. The wizard tower is intended to add zero to the equation of placement strategy. Not being there in person, but having some decent trade offs for doing so. Other sovs should be able to stand on the front line as a warrior or in the back as a battlemage. And yes, uncensored teleport ruins this kind of nuance. 

I have more specific tower bonuses in mind but I am away from my job and therefore cannot avoid work by posting here. 

(Edited for errors)

The key to variety in strategy should be the surrounding area a wizard starts with. Building the first tower will be inexpensive, but will immediately force penalties upon said wizard. It will take much longer to build this kind of building. It will change how the player plays the game. For instance, he will be rewarded with a huge advantage in spell knowledge, probably giving him and his subordinate wizards disciple level spells in every category and increased research abilities. His army gets a significant constitution and strength penalty. They will become tattered minions instead of peasants, mindless orcs instead of valiant warriors (if you are Kingdom they will be mindless brutes). Champions are impossible to predict because the information is too vague. i would want to make them be better wizards, but less capable warriors and rogues. Monsters are the hardest to predict as it is the least constant aspect of the previous game and will likely be changed drastically. I would like to see a more refined version of monsters as a resource. they should be evil, good, and neutral. if you are playing as the opposite morality, you can should be able to enslave or eradicate them or there should be some option to benefit. Being a wizard naturally lends itself to breeding powerful magical beasts. finding an area with a good beast to breed should be a significant bonus for a player or computer that favors wizard towers. Finding any magical advantage will further increase a player's desire to choose the Ivory Tower approach over say The Fellowship Of The Ring approach.

Ivory Towers will also give the Sovereign a choice to summon buildings. This can either be accomplished by copying the firewall spell I know will be in the game or by having a very powerful finish building spell, akin to the Beauty and the Beast cleaning montage. Things will literally build themselves, a simple task for a skilled wizard. Certain additions will be available to the Tower, such as an arcane library, aviary, intelligence bureau, holy chapel, graveyard, and maybe even a landing area for Zeppelins. The idea would be to make the entire city into one massive tower, the foculpoint of magic in the realm. each new addition will add significant bonuses, new spellbooks, quests, and units to your dark/holy realm. I have been toying with making floating buildings, a skill I learned after a year of work in the tile editor. They are a problem for users with lame computers. Damn the poor!

Keeping mind the new iteration of random bonus buildings, I plan to make some really overpowered level 3,4, 5 buildings to be included in the random function of building. In fact it may be that every significant tower addition is added in this way, each one shaping the form and function of one's realm. Hoping for an aviary and getting a dragon's roost would just be so sweet. The problem will be preventing a wizard from having any of the available buildings from the vanilla pool. I wonder if I can prevent them with some prerequisite. 

It sounds like a very neat idea, currently I feel a little stagnant on WoM only being able to do one path and do it well... sometimes I may want to have a powerful group of heroes, sometimes I may want to be the mad wizard on his tower and create my own dungeons and castles to hoard my treasures and knowledge.  Being more able to choose your main path is a very good way of doing things as it takes pressure off the player; they don't have to slavishly build cities if they don't want to.

Exactly, the beta opens soon so I will use this thread as a note taking board for my future mod. 

I am now thinking that the tower should be a cityhub upgrade. As you level, it would get new additions. 

This sounds like a great idea honestly. Wizard Towers were a big deal in MoM and I can see that for the inspiration for them here and to definitely help with City Specialization.

Now that I have played the game, I would change my initial estimates:

+400hp while in city.

+50% Elemental Resistances in city.

+10 Intelligence in city.

+10 Initiative in city.

+20 Health Regeneration while in city.

Guardian Unit is added upon improvement completion. (The type and power of the unit will depend on which Tower Upgrades you choose.)

Double Spell Damage for all magic users. (May be spread out between a few upgrades.)

New Trait Paths unlocked.

New Quest Locations spawned

New Quest Levels in Magic Tree.

New Spells in Magic Tree.

New Items in Magic Tree.

New Creature Lairs spawned. (These will be available to capture and gain new trainable units.)

Faction Traits added upon completion of certain tower improvements.

Each Improvement to your tower will give bonuses and penalties to every aspect of your nation. One option is to build the Dungeon and learn to train something better than mere men. 

Level One Dungeons

Minion Path (Leads to Conjurer Path or Beastmaster Path)

-5 to designed unit Constitution, Strength, Intelligence, and Dexterity

+5 to designed unit Spell Resistance

-80% unit upkeep cost

Level Two Dungeons

Conjurer Path

Beastmaster Path

Level Three Dungeons

Necromancy Path

Demonology Path

Serpent Path

Lycanthropy Path

Level Four Dungeons

Shadowgate Path

Hellmouth Path

Dragon King Path

Ubermeinch Path

By the end your meager Dungeon will become an terror inducing Altar of darkness. You can try to control a Shadowgate or seek out a ritual that will transform you into the God-King of Dragonkind. But beware the dangers in venturing upon sch a quest, for you may end up unleashing  terrible evil that not even you can control. 

The Minion Path would be the standard changes to your abilities after completing the basic Dungeon with a level 1 city. A level 2 city with the appropriate technology (either found questing or by research) will open up the Level 2 upgrade options. I would like to be able to have these become available to build, in a one per city sense. though your other cities will be capped at level 2 as a trade off for such a powerful Tower. 

Building a Conjurer's Circle on top of your dungeons:

-50% to casting cost for all summoned units.

-80% to mana upkeep cost for all summoned units

+2 to summoned units' level.

Several new summoning spells will become available in your spellbook.

New Techs will be added to the Magic Tree. 

New Traits will be available for Mages in the form of Path of the Conjurer. 

New Quests will become available, possibly leading to unique items, maps, technology, and upgrades for your Conjurer's Circle (this would be an upgrade that does not level but offers a unique creature or two to any one dungeon in our empire.

Ex: Nikarrian Circle would allow you to summon a Frost Giant.

Digging new depths in your Dungeons to house the many creatures you keep for your Beastmaster's Dungeon:

-50% to trained creature upkeep cost.

All trained creatures receive the Beastmaster trait. (+1 to constitution, dexterity, initiative, strength, and intelligence per 2 levels.)

New creatures will be trainable in any city with a Beastmaster's Dungeon. (They will be mostly things you might expect to fight in the game.)

New Techs will be available in the Magic Tree.

New traits will be available for Mages in the form of Path of the Beastmaster.

New Quests will be geared to unlock new beasts in any city with a Dungeon or a Beastmaster's Dungeon. Basically if you defeat the boss creature you can capture it and tame it. 

Random Event: Jailbreak! will be a repeatable, but unlikely event added to your territory.

The goal of level 2 Dungeons is to make a choice between between two very different paths a Dungeon can take based on the strategic resources you have access to. Lots of shards would favor the mana upkeep of a conjurer, while excesses of money and labor would lend much more easily to a Beastmaster. Of course I will have a Laboratory that can be upgraded to produce either mana or gold to help out your main city with managing a sizable force with so few cities. But don't expect to go the path of conjuration without a strategy in mind to find and capture at least 4 shards. I want players to see shards while scouting and say, "Ooh, there are finally enough shards near my capital to try out a conjuration game!"

When the time comes for modding some XML, you can call on me if you need the manpower.

Thanks. I will most certainly want testers and xml writers to help. Heavenfall is looking to collaborate with me on the conjuration aspect, which will mean that area will be the entire conjuration system we create plus the bonuses of the Circles. I want to make this mod very compatible with the other content mods that come out. My aim is to simply make this one viable choice in a long list of options. 

Any ideas for bonuses/penalties that would make sense for this mod would be much appreciated by anyone that happens by. 

Back to theory...

Level 3 Dungeons are going to focus on granting a few especially powerful creatures that can only be built in one city as well as defining the player's choice of minion to mass. Each path opens up a one per faction building that will allow a special unit or bonus. Using the one per faction ability, I can offer counters for the game's many strategies:

If you are facing an enemy that uses alot of offensive spells, you will want to build the Serpent's Lair. There you can recruit Ophies and the like to rush mages that believe themselves invincible. Any serpent you see slither about the realm can be found here. Serpents will be excellent at subverting archers and mages. Building the Serpent Temple on top of your capitol's Dungeon will also allow you to make a pact with a Great Snake. The Great Snake will be nigh unstoppable but you will only get one. Use it as a spearhead or leave it to defend during a war, just don't piss it off. 

An enemy that is relying heavily on physical damage would be better countered by delving into the realm of transmogrification. Morphing your helpless populace into werewolves to do your bidding is an oldie, but a classic. A Dark Rites Lair will confer this ability to your cities. These creatures will boast extreme healing bonuses and general resistance to most types of damage. If I can, I would prefer to allow heroes to change into creatures as well, but that will need to be looked into. At the very least they will get beastlike traits. Here your heroes will be the nigh unstoppable force. (All forces will be balanced and have their own counters.) Building a Master's Den in your capitol will allow for heroes to become something more than mere man. 

Necromancy is an ancient and highly requested art. I plan to let this path take the initiative. Why counter the tactics of the weak when you can overwhelm them with the defiled bodies of the dead? Constructing a Temple of the Undead will unlock the secrets of Necromancy for your conjurers. Armies of Skeletal Warriors and Hordes of Zombies will be your tools for destruction. It will take a very defensive strategy to build up enough of these creatures to present a serious threat to the realm, but there will be few things limiting how many damned souls you can raise from the dead. Once on the attack, every kill you make will send the soul to your capitol's Soul Tombs for conscription into your legion of the undead. You will obviously suffer drastic penalties to diplomacy once word gets out about your practices so be ready to defend your Ivory Tower. (If there is any way to have someone yell mortal combat during the random event I will make it happen.) The one pr faction building, Soul Tombs will also unlock new quests, one of which will allow you Sov to absorb souls of the fallen, conferring huge bonuses and mana gains. 

The final option will be to make a pact with the devil himself. Focusing your efforts towards demonology will reap ungodly rewards. You will be able to sacrifice your populace in trade for legions of demonic hellbeasts. This path will involve summoning demons from beyond, as well as creating mayhem by opening small rifts that will spawn beserker demons to ravage the lands. Beware though, as they will come after you as eagerly as any other. Your heroes will get special quests for cursed artifacts that have various consequences and great powers. This path will require careful diplomacy to be allowed to scour the earth for these special artifacts. You will have less power compared to other nations, but can attack indirectly and even trigger events that cause wars to weaken the strongest factions. You will also get bonuses to defense should the other factions get wise to your strategy in the form of Pit of Despair. This one per faction building will delve deep into the earth, allowing legions of demons to pour forth. You need only sacrifice a hero. 

I'm sure I'll be tweaking with the XML in my on ways, but certainly nothing so ambitious as this. 

If you need any help with learning some of the more complicated functions I can probably help. 

Guardian units are going to get big bonuses as well. I think I will be able to make a special tactical map that is very large and has some interesting features. The current Guardian Statue is nice, but it lacks that epic siege feeling I am going for. I would instead make an arena tile that is a smaller version of the tactical map. So the tile you see is where you will be fighting. But the question you should be asking yourself is whom you will be fighting. Each building from the Ivory Towers Mod will give you some kind of bonus when defending. I have already outlined the Tower's affect. The arena will hopefully be upgradable, depending on how much I can mod the tactical map for cities. Even so, The Dungeon you have will give you units according to its level. Regular defenders will be changed out for minions. Each city level will give you mage defenders that increase in power and number. There will be a special unit added to your side from the arena, ranging from Umberdroths to Skeletal Champions. Of course any summoned unit or trained beast will get bonuses when defending your Ivory Tower. To top all that off, you will get a spell cast at the beginning of every battle, either from the Ivory Tower or a special monument. It can range from increased spell resistance to a lightning storm that hits your enemy before they can act. 

That won't mean you are invincible, just very well defended. There will be loot added to specifically thwart any one of these strategies. I will try my best to keep things well balanced, it all just depends on what the vanilla version is like. I am also trying to keep the AI in mind so that it can use this mod and you can defeat it. The idea is to put you in a situation where expansion is very difficult and being besieged is a common situation. Given how powerful high level units can become, this mod may simply make defending a fair fight. We will have to see how it goes. 

I think the Beastmaster path will need an entire content mod to make it a desirable option. This will be optional and modular. 

-I will trade Serpent for Dragonkind. There are not enough snakes.

-The health bonus will decrease due to the number of helpers that will be spawned on each attack. It needs to be just high enough so that an assassin can't kill him on turn 1.

-Just fought a tiger or perhaps panther in the game. That design is going to make Beastmaster alot of fun. 

-I am worried that any mods that use enchantments will break the game when a Sov has the trait that allows zero cost to enchant anyone wearing the Pariden Crown. Any expansion of enchantments will be giving them that much better of an advantage.

I recommend that you mod the procipinee crown to reduce EnchantmentMaintenanceMultiplier by 1, instead of being a multiplier of -100%. Then, you can use 

SetUnitStat has a higher priority than normal modifiers. The result of casting this spell, if you modded the crown like I suggested, would be that the spell costs 1 mana upkeep both for those who wear the crown, and those who don't. This effect would leak over to other enchantments. In short, your spell would be disabling the effects of the crown.

It's not perfect, but it's one solution.

Edit: I didn't actually test this, but the theory should be sound. It depends a lot on if the maintenance cost of spells is static and set when you cast a spell, or if the maintenance is automatically updated depending on if you have the crown or not.

Edit2: I'll test it quickly, I have some test items set up so it will be quick

Yeah, it was possible. Here is some example xml. http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=q5usx8M5

Again, note, this spell disables the crown effect on the wearer. Maintenance costs for spells are dynamically updated, based on that unitstat.

Edit: I also tested setting the unitstat to 0.5. The mana upkeep for spells was then 0.5. So we can make units or champions with "less" maintenance cost on spells. That's good to know, something I will surely use in the expandedfactionsmod. "Trained units require 20% less mana maintenance costs from spells". It may also be something we can use for the summoner's mod, for the long-range summoner path. Since he's not going to be in combat, we can more safely adjust his maintenance cost limits.

Ex:

Summoner's Path (long-range) 1: -25% to all maintenance costs on this fella

Summoner's Path (long-range) 2: Another -25% to all maintenance costs on this fella

Summoner's Path (long-range) 3: Another -25% to all maintenance costs on this fella

Edit: Obviously such a trait would be useless if you cast a spell like above to setunitstat the maintenance cost to 100% default. But, knowing the limits, you can think around them.

That is a clever way to make enchantment mods modular. Nice work. I just got done with a solid magic start game as Procipene and specifically gave her every enchantment. She was a powerhouse as the game went on. It's funny, the subtle differences to making an ability -1 or -100%. 

One thing we could do with some really powerful summons is make them cost more than one mana per turn, but allow the Summoner's Path to eventually reduce the cost by 75%. This would be great for dragons and death demons, preventing the player from being able to get too many unless the correct path is chosen. 

The Ivory Towers Mod is hoping to decrease the cost of casting the spell itself. So they should function in separate areas. 

I am going to make some quests today for this mod. I will send you the result so you can see how I am framing a quest that opens up a new summons spell. 

You know, since the unitstat is so well implemented, we could make a tower that reduces mana maintenance cost for all people in a city by say 25%. Then we could have hero traits for the summoner with another 50%. We figured out a cool mechanic here, and it's not fair to steal all the benefit for one mod when we're developing two.

The increase in mana cost on high level summons was exactly was I was thinking as well. Great minds and all that.

PS. A better solution for the crown might be to simply reduce it to 50% less mana, instead of 100% less mana. It's still very powerful, but not so gamebreakingly powerful with mods, if you know what I mean.

Another option would be to set the crown itself to setunitstat -75% maintenance cost. So you'd have a 25% cost on the wearer, but the wearer wouldn't benefit from a tower or trait that reduces maintenance cost