Suggestions for a rework to lizardmen mechanics (geomantic web, blessed spawnings), Nakai and tehen

Forumaccountkroqgar

A couple of simple suggestions for a rework to the two lizardmen features, which are severely outdated and plainly unfun to play.

Blessed spawnings rework

Blessed Spawnings are currently completely random, giving the player no agency, often just give you low tier units, and don't include DLC units.

A simple system that can be adapted to all DLC units is the sacred spawnings mechanic from tabletop (http://sgabetto.free.fr/Telechargements/sacredhosts.pdf)

CA would have to create a blessing for each old one, for example a sotek spawning would have poison and frenzy, a huanchi one stalk and vanguard deployment, chotec gives fire damage and perfect vigour.

There’s a number of ways that they can make it so that all units have access to them, you can create an interface like beastmen or tomb kings have in which you can spend a currency (old ones energy) for buying different spawnings, you would get this energy by fighting enemies of the great plan. What blessing you can get can be random or be influenced by what races you’ve been fighting (for example, you’ve killed a lot of skaven recently and get sotek blessings)

Another system would make it so that every time you recruit a unit there's a % chance it gets one of the blessings. Since you can only recruit from DLCs you own there's no problem. The % could be dependent on both the geomantic web level and the strength of your current enemies, incentivizing tough wars(based on a system like the waagh trophies)

If CA is really opposed to giving us new spawnings they could tie the current ones to having complete provinces of Lustria and the Southlands, just like the empire elector count units work. So, for example, to get blessed solar engines you need to own the complete Hexoatl province and either use Old One Energy or a cooldown like the empire units have.

Geomantic web

The geomantic web suffers from two problems, first is that it isn’t interactive and secondly it’s underwhelming.

To make it more Dynamic the geomantic web shouldn’t be upgraded by a building but instead requiring you to fight ritual battles for each tier you want to upgrade it, like the wood elves tree healing rituals. The web system would remain in place (so to have a tier 3 web in a settlement you would need to be connected to another tier 3 restored province) but linked to the restoration of temple cities through rituals, not buildings.

The bonus that would make all this battles worth it would be a teletransportation system, allowing you to hop one army from the capital of a province to any capital directly linked by the web. It could be either limited to at least tier 4 restored temple cities or have a cooldown based on the tier like the wood elves cooldown.

The alignment of order is pretty bad (untainted+ plague resistance) , it practically only exists as a counter to the mechanic of other race, the skaven plague. The bonus to public order should be moved to it, and replaced with a small construction cost discount in the alignment of crafting.

Another alternative to the teletransportation bonus would be instead giving tier 4-5 temple cities the possibility to terraform through a ritual, so after triggering a ritual like the Wood elves incursions and resisting 10 turns in control, the settlements of that province get improved climate or a climate changed to one lizardmen can tolerate.


Tech tree overhaul

At the moment they have an insanely long tree, on the level of dwarfs, but it doesn’t offer any meaningful choice in terms of playstyle, since every campaign you’re gonna investigate the same branches in the same order. It needs to be mixed up a bit, for example separating the beast branches into two branches, one for the single entity dinos and other for the support dinos like salamanders and terradons.

The Branch of “order” is plainly awful compared to any other race (-3% chance for enemy hero success, +5% chance for hero success), it should give stronger diplomatic bonuses with old ones children (dwarfs, high and wood elves, and empire/bretonnia). The sequence of scrying could give bonuses to line of sight and the sequence of infiltration bonuses to ambush chance.

Stances

Remove channeling, which is redundant on top of astromancy and replace it with raiding. Lizardmen are perfectly capable of raiding for food and sustenance.

Improved astromancy stance, compared with other unique stances like greenskin raiding camp (which asks for zero movement) it’s a useless stance, because most races around Lustria have better movement than LM and the AI always moves on forced march. Astromancy shouldn’t take an extra 25% movement, it should give an extra 25% movement to allow lizardmen to deal with the jungle and river movement penalties, if not permanently at least the next turn, instead of extra line of sight.

Economy and buildings rework

Lizardmen have the weakest economy out of any core race of WH1 and WH2, with resource buildings that give no money or upkeep effects but no chance of trading, since even other lizardmen hate lizardmen. It’s clearly balanced around how Itza and Hexoatl start with a gold mine. A simple change would be giving them higher recruitment costs and lower upkeep to represent the nature of each spawning being important, a variant on how tomb kings work.
Part of the economy rework should be a reduction in the number of buildings, lizardmen have the largest number of buildings on top of bad income.The scrying pool and star chamber could be combined and the cold one and terradon building too. The star chamber also needs to reduce how much it buffs the recruit rank of slann in favour of also buffing other lords.

Slann

Slann should have access to all eight lores and be stronger mages. They are slow, have large attribute, get no mounts and are awful at melee, they should at least be as good as casters which don’t require a rite like high elven archmages or ancient treemen (perfect vigour, spellcaster,armoured and higher health points, capable in melee). I think a simple change for campaign would be reducing the number of skill points it takes to activate all their branches, this would be balanced by slann having a lower recruitment rank via the star chamber.

Tehenhauin rework

Instead of being blocked from the regiments of renown until he sacrifices them, they should be replaced with either original regiments of renown or blessed spawnings.

Change his starting building from a saurus to a skink recruitment building. This is an oversight that shows how little playtested this campaign has been

Change the buffs given by the sacrifices making them more significant but skink exclusive. Tehenhauin sacrifice mechanic bonus should be reworked by looking at Grom’s cauldron , which is mostly centered on buffing goblins, not generic greenskins. Tehenhauin should allow you to play a mostly skink campaign like Grom does to goblins, with buffs to all the different skink units (troglodon, terradon, ripperdactyl, salamanders) and skink adjacent units like kroxigors, instead of being yet another saurus campaign.

An example:

Sacrifice of Amaxon: Gives frenzy to skink and skink like units

Sacrifice of Xahutec: Gives +25 armor to skink and skink like units

Sacrifice to incantol: 200 xp per turn to and skink like units

The other adjustment it needs is to make the sacrifices feel less like a gacha machine, the sacrifices of Quetza and Huanabic should give you some choice on what banner/follower you get. Maybe make them limited to stop abuse.

Nakai

The problems with Nakai are based on him being a horde that can't raze for money and is stuck defending a vassal which the AI thrases.

His vassal should be removed, giving instead the buildings to Nakai's faction, keeping them unupgradeable as they are.This solves Nakai’s diplomatic and money problems, no longer being forced to beg for money or defend a vassal which doesn't do anything.

The possible downside is you having to defend the settlements, which could be seen as a drag, but you can just autoresolve them, which is exactly what the vassal already does.

His rites could be replaced with generic lizardmen rites and his rite of mastery

Changes to rituals

The rite of primeval glory is disliked by both players facing lizardmen who can’t deal with it early game, and lizardmen players who see it as a one shot gimmick at the start of a campaign (and conditioned to getting a random blessed spawning misión), too expensive early on and too unnecesary latter. Instead of creating an army of dinosaurs, it should give you access to a small number (5-6) of blessed spawnings.

Tiktaq’to is a skink commander, so instead of replacing the rite of sotek with the rite of tzunki, he should replace the rite of ferocity or the rite of primeval glory. Just like dark elves factions don’t replace the rite of khaine, which is the most important, lizardmen factions shouldn’t replace the rite of sotek. I also think that the rite of tzunki should be changed like the sacrifice to anath raema was but I know lots of people love it like it is.