You mean commanders? I always felt there were nearly too much offers compared to the base classes, Magistrate with 10%, Tomb Keeper with 6% (increased to 16% when none present), and in later game Oracle with 4%, then two mercenary leaders with 6% each, in addition to the main commander who respawns for free with 16% chance each turn and the ones you get for free to get started.

While not quite Priest King levels of excess, that was always plenty in my games.
Mm, I guess I could add it though, still have to clear up some things eventually, anyway (like the junge tribe villages made usable, where I completely missed to answer the question, sorry.)

It seems that there is no way to recieve recruitment bonus for your special recruitments no matter what for this class which is kinda rough

Is there any way to convert the various jungle tribe villages into useful cult sites for Arun?

I think I found the trick to obliterating settlements to the point of not leaving ruins with a single desert avatar.

Step 1: take the settlement, and have it not turn into a ruin (say, due to being a city that degrades into a town or a village into a hamlet, or just it not happening by some other circumstance).
Step 2: leave the tile immediately the next turn.
Step 3: the tile now turns into an empty desert yielding no ruin.

Concerning ports, that makes sense.

Right now, the capitol gets turned into the haunted version by the desolator ability if not already, so maybe give something that the class can do with the haunted capitol.

Also, have you considered bringing magic resistance for your mod units in line with coe vanilla? Extremely powerful magical beings in vanilla have 10 mr base, with only doom horrors getting 12, yet this mod as well as your fae one seem to regularly have beings with resists well beyond what the usual vanilla statline has. (This isn't counting bonuses given by bless or etc.)

Ports and Capitolum are not usable currently. Lore-wise Arun would not really like the oceans, due to the whole affair with Leviathan back in the olden days, so this would just be cleansed and left to smolder. Capitolum was a bit to specific a location for me to ever consider, to be honest.

For the town just disappearing... Mm, sorry, that one never happened in my games either, and in this case I can't really imagine what even could be happening here. I guess I will eventually have to make a test tun with a few dozen Desert Avatars to see if I can pinpoint any strange behaviours in that direction.

Notably, a city got demoted to a town, then one turn after the avatar left and was 3 tiles away, it got obliterated leaving no ruins.

I had one of them leading some summoned heralds and jinn type troops. I never saw lava form but I did see a city and town get deleted, leaving nothing. Compare this to the desolator ability which seems to make city ruins just fine.

Also, can the class get something to do with ruined ports or the capitol? They can't be turned into a necropolis.

I don't think I've ever seen them turn tiles into lava? But I don't think I stacked a bunch of Desolators together often.

Leaving no ruins behind is unusual, although when you stack multiple of them in one army, the accumulated heat effect might turn any terrain into smoldering ashes or outright lava, I think? Something I intended to tone down eventually, since that one is really too destructive for its own good.

I noticed the desert avatar seems far more destructive than usual, obliterating cities to the point of leaving no ruins behind. Is this intended?

Appreciate you figuring it out, I had not realized the forest trait accomplished such a thing. I will just need to edit my local version of coexpansion for now to make oasis not a forest.

Yes, applying "forest" to Oases makes them vulnerable to desolation, despite being "desertok".
Now everything makes sense again.

Ah, I see. CoExpansion turns Oases into forests, that might cause some unusual behaviour. Not sure if it can overwrite the "desertok" trait, but I can imagine that there might be some conflict, as both traits would not be designed to be on the same location in base game.

The coexpansion mod changes the terrain's income but I don't think it changes other aspects of the terrain. I also use the bystander mod. Strangely somehow after speaking about it here I have yet to see an oasis turn into desert. I will need to see if this holds up.

A dead forest? Do you run other mods that change terrain?
I can't really imagine why it would ever turn into a forest otherwise, but I will check later and see how that goes. Usually I stay around on Oases all the time without any problems, unless a recent game update changed something? But that seems unlikely, CoE mods are rarely influenced by those unlike other games. Very strange indded.

To be clear, the oasis was destroyed after being created.

Yeah, I saw them get destroyed by the desolator ability. One time, oddly, it was destroyed by turning into a dead forest. Multiple times I have had them be destroyed the turn after they were made, but not always.

You create an Oasis, and then the Oasis gets destroyed?
That sounds unusual, because Oases are desert prove, so once you move onto it and cast the ritual it should be safe. If not we have a strange bug here that was never present in my games before.

The oasis is a real problem because the movement cost of creating one is 3, so the architect can't get off the farm fast enough to avoid potentially blowing up the thing he just made, which seems very wasteful considering the effort needed to make it.

@catfoodbob
Honest answer? I never really looked into this mechanic. But thinking about it, it would also be a balance consideration. The class already has 6% chance per turn on the main caster (Tomb Keeper) and 10% on the secondary caster (Scribe Magistrate), then later 4% for its tertiary caster and then two other commander types with 6% each. And their cornerstone caster respawns for free when killed. That is a lot already, I think, and while some classes like the Priest King or the Barbarians have more volume, these numbers already are the upper limit of what I feel as reasonable for CoE.

Time for some responses, it seems.
First, thank you to morkelebdwyer, Kazeck and drawain for your kind words.

@crawlers
It is indeed suspicious, why a Cult absorbed with its own righteousness would cause so much wanton destruction wherever it walks. Hrm, but besides the lore-talk, later there is a possibility to create Oases from thin-air (well, desert plains), until then one is rewarded for walking cautiously, but usually an early Oasis is a nice bonus rather than a necessity for progress in my experience.

Why do temples not have any effect on recruitement of commanders and such when that seems like their primary thing? is it balancing due to having too many temples?

Creating an oasis from a farm to save it from being obliterated by the desert is a bit dubious considering how the desolator ability destroys oases and every unit that transforms/creates oases that I've seen so far has desolator.

Very nice mod, thank you :)

Thanks for gracing us with another awesome mod Pascal! I really delight in your flavorful and cool class mods/concepts.

I'll be giving this one a more thorough play through later, but what I did today was great fun!

this is a great mod, I love the lore and hope you make a behemoth mod, for the deity the fire god killed that the maruts worshipped, the dark god.

@Green Ghost
Ah, I see, yes. Negative terrain numbers -1066 till -1068 overlap. For a quick local fix you could open my mod file, search and replace all instances of them with another number, like -1166 instead of -1066 and so forth, that should avoid the problem for this particular mod incompatibility. With only about 200 possible numbers here to work with, it is nearly unavoidable to step on each others toes sometimes, sadly.

@Nathan Pascal
Yeah it's the terrain, when both mods are active all villages on the map are replaced with desert tiles.

Aight, that's good to know. Means I ain't gotta rewind time a few dozen turns lmao

@Green Ghost
Mm, what do Raise the Levies and my class do that might conflict here? I suppose terrain numbers again, really wish those were auto generated and not fixed.

@Feraa
Do you mean the Relic Priest (Prophet/Principal)? Yes, those respawn when dying, free of cost. As long as you hold a Necropolis or Sacred City of the Dead the chance should be 16% per turn, with a message to inform about it at round start when it happend.
Only if the Priest dies and all Cities are leveled by Meteors one would be locked out, but this seemed so unlikely I never made a fail-safe for that, although I am sure, someone someday will experience it and I will regret my optimism.

Seems strange to me to want to play this mod with another class's overhaul lol

Damn, your mods are the best but it seems to conflict with "Raise the Levies!", which i really don't wanna play without.

I must now ask... Is there an event or opportunity to get a new Altar unit if ours dies? Or is the run "failed" if it dies? Cuz mine got ambushed by the aforementioned rivals, losing his entire army, along with his life. I've got 4 more turns, but I don't want to keep wasting time if I can't get him back, so I can just revert to an older save if that's the case?

Yep. Marching is what armies do as well lol Marsh is just another word for swamps.

And I have discovered the Pillars of Creation. Lovely times, having to march across the map to seize it from my strongest rival's lands lmfao Gotta amass my forces into a cohesive army so I can sweep through them. Darned Hoburgs... Lol

Ah, English is so weird sometimes, I was sure it could not be "march" because that is the name of the month already and did not bother to check. Not that German is much better, sometimes... So thanks for the correction!

And thanks for the compliment as well, of course, always glad to hear people enjoy my mods.

Small bug report while I'm at it. Well, typo correction. The Golden Resolve ritual reads "increases the rate with which they might assemble and marsh forth." Marsh should be march lol

Also, as usual, fantastic mod, Pascal. Always know I'm in for a good game when I play one of your mods, and this storyline-heavy idea is quite lovely!

Mmm. Thanks for the confirmation lol I dunno if I'd say a Pillar of Creation should be. A Sphinx, sure, but I don't know what Pillars of Creation are, so I can't say anything on them lol

You have found all of them, yes. Basically the idea was, every tile that can be created by the Architect and the Magistrate, but also including the base versions, so the normal Ziggurat und normal Pyramids that can spawn at map generation.

Pillars of Creation and Sphinx are not included, although one might expect them to be, now that I think about it. Mm.

What, exactly, are Cult Sites? I can't seem to find anywhere that tells us? From what I've GATHERED, it seems to be Necropolises, Oasises, Camps, Pyramids, and Ziggurats. Are there more?

I only just noticed, that the Monument of Arun does not require ten Shrines as the desription claims. Now I am seriously unsure, whether I removed the requirement on purpose and forgot to change the text, or if I somehow removed the requirement by accident. Huh.

Really impressive mod, had a lot of fun playing it :)

That does not really surprise me, something like an overhaul will probably use many new tiles and since those are fixed numbers and not dynamic like, say, ritual numbers, incompatibility is to be expected. Nothing I could really solve, sadly, changing the numbers to work with one mod might just make it incompatible with another mod which uses the then new number range.

Hey, when using this together with "conquest of Elysium 5 large overhaul" the necropolis turns into a battlefield.

Thanks Doppelganger, although balance is always so weird, I am never quite sure about it.
No solid clue about the "when" I am afraid, still plotting about the mechanics and units and... everything really. Not much time currently, sadly.

Congrats on a great and balanced mod.
Cant wait for the next one to go online. Do you have any idea when it will happen @Nathan Pascal?

@NewMars @Spartan878

After dark winter forests and scorching desert sands I might set my sights on boiling swamps next. Although, to be honest, my creative ambitions might be limited a little by my inability to draw any new sprites, so I am not sure yet, if I will be able to do what I have in mind.

Another great addition for the Armies of Darkness. Makes me wonder whats next.

Mm, hard to tell, even overhauls and misc mods could introduce new terrains, to be absolutely sure one would have to open all those fills and look for the terrain number 781 in them, but I will take a look at least to see if the Idle Player class in particular could have anything to do with it.