Community project: Revamp 1 Amos nation, Just one, all working together

[Sombre]

Community!

I have a fun project for us. I would like to collaborate with all of you on 'revamping' one of Amos' many nations to make it

A) Balanced to the vanilla dom3 spectrum of power
Thematically deep and interesting
C) Polished

and yet

D) True to the original mod, in essence

This will require no graphical work. It will require almost no knowledge of modding, since I am happy to act as your hands in this respect. What it will require is a lot of changes to stats, some cool ideas, some developing of ideas already in the mod and most importantly, the writing and development of an interesting theme through flavour text, abilities and the like.

I've always thought there's a certain something to Amos' mods and I really believe they were an important landmark in dom3 modding. That said, they do tend to be out of balance with dom3 and lacking thematic depth.

I want everyone to be able to join in with suggestions, bits of description, elaborations and the like. In this thread there are no bad ideas. Just ideas. If you all become keen on something I hate I'll tell you, but I'll mod it in just the same, since I want this to be a community thing.

If the community isn't interested, then I'll just leave this project alone.


A good first step might be to pick a mod to work on, right? Thoughts?


EA Principalities, Arrival of Travelers
EA Seraphim, Angelic Crusade
EA Insectoids, The Blight
EA Theran Empire, Time of Dreamers
MA Seraphim, Impirium Angelicus
MA Commonwealth, Landfall
MA Theran Empire, Horror Scourge
MA Fallen Empire, Chaos Wars
MA Stigia, Desert of Secrets
LA New Crobuzon, Expansionist Government
LA Trade Confederation, New Dawn
LA Blood Elves, Ultimate Corruption
LA Fallen Nation, Stigian Corruption
LA Theran Empire, Reign of the Vampiri
LA Hellgate

[Trumanator]

One thing to perhaps consider in choosing is that most of Amos' nations have EA/MA/LA versions. If we're only doing one, it might feel a bit incomplete to do only part of a 3-part set. On the other hand, it might also give us encouragement to adapt the whole triplicate if its fun! Just some food for thought.

I believe the solos are Principalities, Insectoids(possibly part of stigia series?), Commonwealth, New Crobuzon, Blood Elves, and Trade Confederation.

Personally I think the most interesting adaptation would be one of the angel nations.

[Squirrelloid]

Interested but totally unfamiliar with Amos's mods. So, uh, pick a series and let me know so i can start looking =P

[Sombre]

I just stuck up links for you lazy fellows.

You should also look in the mod catalogue by Globu to check out the graphics for amos mods in the various eras.

[TreantHugger]

I'll get in on this.

I also have some sprites that are in need of a mod - I'll post those later.

Edit: Did this guy have any idea what he was doing? Sacred slingers? WTF?

[vfb]

Just based on the graphics, I'd go for Fallen Empire (Chaos Wars).

[TreantHugger]

I can make an alpha of "Travellers" by Friday.

[His Rotundity]

I might try my hand at Angelic Crusade. It's an interesting concept to base a nation around, as every unit is holy. I wonder if it's possible to balance an all-Holy nation. Only one way to find out! I'd also be interested in doing Blood Elves at some point.

[Finalgenesis]

Looks interesting, do I have to adopt one or can I just drop bits and pieces on those I find interesting?

[rdonj]

I don't really think it is possible to balance an all-sacred nation. And I don't think we should try. It was an interesting thought experiment, but even if it had been done better, I'm not sure it would make for a great nation.

One that I think might be fun to balance is Dreamers. That's a part of the theran/horror scourge group IIRC, but it had some interesting summons and ideas, and might be one of his more fleshed out nations overall. Although on second glance it doesn't look like this mod is listed in there.... Hey, hellgate isn't there either.

Travelers also seems like a very tricky one to balance. Absolutely the only thing I remember about the mod is that it's basically an immortal freespawn nation. For the most part the freespawn isn't that good, and IIRC they don't have good buffing paths to strengthen them. But on the other hand I think they're also all flying and stealthy, and the better ones come with mind blasts. They also come in pretty large numbers. They're still probably better than vampires unbuffed, and come in pretty huge numbers. So I really don't think they are balanceable in present form and will need serious modification to be valid.


Edit: It's interesting how many people seem to have misread sombre's opening post here!

[TreantHugger]

Yeah, but it's a lot faster to just redo a mod by yourself than to wait for the committee to form. Given the number of choices, it's not a big deal.

[Soyweiser]

Good idea.

Ps, you forgot hellgate. The totally broken blood only nation.

[Sombre]

I may well have missed off a couple of Amos nations. If you could provide me with links to them, that would be good. After all, I can't actually see Shrapnel because they banned me. So help a brother out.


Just to clarify: I am not suggesting we each pick one amos nation and go off and revamp it. I am suggesting that we, as a community, pick ONE amos nation and all work together on that ONE nation.

The objective is not to get the maximum number of Amos mods 'working' (they already work), it's to revamp one of his mods and all contribute a bit to it in terms of the design and the theme. Trying to do them all would be way too ambitious.


rdonj - I like the feedback you're coming here with. I agree that any nation based on an integral very hard to balance gimmick is probably not the best to try and work with.

I'm not sure about the idea that we should do a one-off nation rather than one of the ones that occurs in multiple eras. The one-offs tend to be a bit more gimmicky and have less theme to work with, but more importantly I don't see why we can't just yoink one nation out of a set of 2 or 3, even if we never do anything to its siblings in other eras.

I don't think we should add/edit/remove any graphics for any of the mods. There's really no need to unless a particular graphic is spectacularly bad or in a poor format.

Can you grab me links to hellgate and dreamers?

[Soyweiser]

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=37922

Hellgate.

Couldn't find the dreamers that quickly.

[TreantHugger]

Hellgate : http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=37922
Dreamers : http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=40799