Faction Thread 2: Vampire Counts

[Bwian]

To be honest ... units like skeletons and zombies should, quite possibly, be considered to be 'mercenary' units recruitable by the leaders. This way, the troops can be 'raised' without the need for any kind of building. Only a faction 'general' would be able to raise them. If we can tie their availability to a hidden resource ( shallow graves? ) then that gives us all we need.

Incidentally....having been watching Shaun of the Dead again, I have been inspired to start work on a zombie model

[uanime5]

Could we give a General a Necromancer trait so that they could recruit the undead (traits are not my speciality)?

[Bwian]

They should all have the ability to raise undead troops. They are the 'peasants' and the basic levy troops for the faction. Special things may be needed to raise the more potent forces.... but not the cannon fodder....which, I suppose was cannon fodder before it was raised as cannon fodder .... poor devils. Sometimes life's a bitch

[Myrddraal]

I think Mercs sound like a good way to go for undead factions, have 0 or minimal population in their home countries, have their income come from special buildings etc. Is there a way to restrict mercs to one faction, or are they always available to all?

Perhaps a script could be used to add mercs to undead 'home' regions when an undead faction leader is present. Then the act of hiring them would be the act of raising them. The main problem would be other factions raising armies of zombies which weren't recruited by the undead factions...

[uanime5]

What Myrddraal said is possible and does occur in M2TW, for example the Welsh Spearmen can only be recruited by the English in England. This is because the export_descr_unit.txt can restrict which factions can recruit which units.

[Casuir]

Mercs can be limited by religion at least. Having a population of 0 though doesnt neccessarily mean you cant produce troops, recruitment doesnt decrease the population in mtw2. Theres other factors involved here though, giving them no populaion would limit income and you'd never be able to upgrade your cities, you'd need to balance the economy which would get thrown out as soon as they took a city with some population.

[Bwian]

You don't need to limit the population to zero... the idea of having Vampire Counts recruiting base units as mercs would make them able to raise armies in a different way. The other 'core' units would still be recruitable in the cities, but they would require special bildings or upgraded cities. You can't restrict the growth as such, since this would prevent expansion.

I saw this more as a way of making the recruitment for this faction a little different and unusual.

[Jargon]

I recently started a Russian Grand Campaign, and noticed that you can loosley interpret the characters' accents as a sort of sly transylvanian. I havn't tried many other factions, but does anyone else think this would be a good voice set for the Vampire Counts?