I will try this mod, I really like the idea.
How does the AI use these? I am using Community Memes that uses template gods for the AI, is this mod compatible with yours?

kudos

The AI will generate random Pretenders, and therefore will pick the new chassis, although it won't lean into their gimmicks and might do unsafe things like take an Earth Serpent and blow up its own forts.

I'd like to have a full set of AI god templates included with the mod so that AI nations always pick Gods they can use and with the right scales/blesses etc. That will take some time though.

Hello, this is the list of pretenders I have banned while in use of this mod (with some new ones added to it in dom6). Perhaps it will be of some use in rebalancing things. I play on settings that have many provinces and encourage a long game.

protean abomination, statue of fertility, divine sage empress, terracotta emperor, great queen, hun came, spirit of bones, deified emperor, duiu of thunder, idol of the ancient warrior, yazad king, destroyer of worlds, devi of good fortunes, saurolich, foul statue, matrona of healing springs, green man, black bull, idol of sustenance, sacred geyser, nyorai, markata master, emissary of antrax, criosphinx, jade emperor, kami of fertility, black tortoise of the north, azure dragon of the east

Thanks Crawlers, I would note that a lot of these have been tweaked from the Dom5 incarnations with an eye to scaling a little less aggressively.

Interested in your thinking on some of these - a few like the Yazad King or Matrona don't seem to have an immediate problem in larger games?

Checked yazad king, looks like a relic from dom5 when he was far more broken and freespawned lots of 0 upkeep s1 mages, now he seems fine and I removed him from my own list.

Matrona gets 2 gems per temple per turn - I banned every pretender that gets more than 1/turn except for the statue of the silent god - and ontop of this gets healing for all units not just sacreds, and some sacred freespawn.

Many of these get banned due to uncontrollable growth in gold/pop (eg. statue of fertility, jade emperor, divine sage empress, azure dragon of the east), much more potential gem income (matrona of healing springs, duiu of thunder, sacred geyser, emissary of antrax, devi of good fortune), cranked freespawn (protean abomination, markata master, green man), or broken interactions (foul statue gives a lot of 0 upkeep researchers to ermor/lemuria), unlimited scaling of bless effects (destroyer of worlds, black bull), giving lots of no upkeep mages (black tortoise of the north)

If that list is useful to you, I can try to assemble a list of pretenders that seem really awful at scaling up. Maybe some are suppose to be like that, but it could be useful to know.

I wonder if Piconye's temple should cost 300 instead of 450? Just like ind, they also need temple to recruit more of their scared troops.

The Zmey Gorynch probably needs a price increase or something. It is one of the best supercombatant chassis that I have seen, with 5 attacks (one of which is aoe 1), 20 natural prot, unsurroundable 2, and 10 fear. It expands incredibly well, at least with enlarge+regen which is how I have been running it, it is super mobile on the strategic map, it comes with 500 extra starting gold which is a nice bonus, every time it takes a throne it generates an A1 mage, a few gems, and a very potent expansion party that also can be hard to deal with as a player (The sylphs are relatively mediocre but the air elementals are real nasty), and to top it all off if you for some reason want to it can turn into a stealthy seducer. It should at least get a price increase, and could probably also stand to lose the 20 points per extra path it shares with dragons; other niche dragon pretenders like the Azi have standard monstrous 80 points per path (the Azi seems like the pretender most similar to the zmey gorynch; somewhat killier at base with chaos power 2 and a breath attack but doesn't have the cheap extra paths and has a much worse throne ritual). Finally, not sure why it is size 9 unlike every other type of dragon pretender, though the being affected by enlargement is a nice bonus.

Some additions to what I previously said. The income increasing ones might not be so broken except on popkill nations as dom6 greatly increased the amount of pop and income and thus diminished the impact of these pretenders.

Some immobile pretenders added by this mod are missing -1 master forger as basically all immobiles got, but of course the anvil should not get this.

Thanks crawlers. With regards to the balance of scaling effects, this is something that is a bit of a thorny subject. Games can range from a 5-person blitz to an all-nations megagame that will go to turn 200. I've tried to balance the scaling effects so they are worthwhile in an 8-12 player game without being the only choice. This does mean they might scale excessively if you are playing bigger games than that though.

I tried to also place some controls on the effects to prevent them getting out of hand. Getting the most out of your 2 gems per temple, for example, either means having a lot of unforted temples vulnerable to raiding, or investing a ton in forts. Same for effects that require fort-temples, you are having to invest a lot into those provinces to get the benefit. I'm currently in a game at turn 73 and after upkeep I'm only left with around 200-gold each month. To build a new temple and fort is around 1600 gold, so I can't just pop one of these out each month. Both the Black Bull and the Destroyer of Worlds also had their effects lowered a little, so they no longer scale as much as they used to.

With this in mind, I'm not looking at curbing the scaling of most of the Pretenders listed at the moment. If any seem to be running out of control I will take another look though. I'll get the immobiles updated with the forge penalty where it was missed.

Originally posted by 一般通过cataphract:

I wonder if Piconye's temple should cost 300 instead of 450? Just like ind, they also need temple to recruit more of their scared troops.

Piconye doesn't have the thing where they can literally only recruit sacred troops in their cap, so I don't think it is as needed there. Temples can give some pretty strong bonuses in Spark and so a 50% discount is quite hefty.

Originally posted by Lordlynel:

The Zmey Gorynch probably needs a price increase or something.

The Zmey Gorynch should have worse stats in return for being size 9 - the sprite is somewhat smaller than the other Dragons so I think I'll keep that distinction. Thanks for spotting that. It gained the bites but lost a breath weapon, which is usually one of the more powerful Dragon abilities, so I was thinking that was a pretty fair tradeoff.

The Zmey is definitely a strong early-game Pretender choice, but is it that much better than say a Red Dragon?

I play with 25 provs/player and caves with around 7-10 ish players roughly, and I try to build a fort temple in every province. It takes time to accomplish that, but it happens eventually with how I set things up. In my late era game I seem to have spent 4k on gold in construction this turn and generally I have actually more than one fort per turn going up on average.

Even if you do not want to go after most of those, I would suggest going after the duiu of thunder as he gets 4.3 gem income per temple on average later on (due to exploding 1d6) which far surpasses any gem income any other pretender can do (2 per temple).

The Duiu of Thunder actually has a description bug - the temple effect is 5% x candles and not 10% x candles as stated. I'll get that fixed for the next update.

At the true rate I feel it is more in line with the 2/temple of other Pretenders.

As it currently stands, the Zmey gorynch has more or less the same physical stats as a dragon, and can be enlarged for a bigger health pool. It also gets to cast magic at full path levels even in dragon form, while normal dragons can't do. The big thing is that while I'm not sure how useful the dragons events are in the long term, and my preferred settings including more thrones than usual exacerbate the issue, I think you are underestimating how strong getting a super strong expansion party from every throne is. The Zmey can solo a lot of thrones with an enlarge regen bless, and then it spawn a force of air elementals that can easily deal with most normal provinces

Dark crystal seems over powered. Reduce the # of enslaved enemies with master enslave to 15-20%. Casting teleport-> returning has basically no way to kill this thing while losing a lot of people

Returning does grant a 7% chance of being lost in the void. This should provide some disincentive to just try that every turn.

If it proves too oppressive I can lower the aoe to 10% of enemies.

One question about the pop growth pretenders scaling out of control:
Doesn't that run into the softcap of overpopulation?
Each province can hold only so many people and even if the Pretender adds more people, it just means that you are eventually getting a negative growth bonus and reach a balance, right?