The Black Sun Fleet by Mortrau

Greetings! Finally, my 1.5 years of work has finished and I can present you The Black Sun Fleet – a brand new Black Ark faction. It is fully custom and not presented in lore, but still lore-friendly in my opinion. It is ruled by survived druchii male sorcerers and consists of pirates, slavers and exiles of all sorts. More info about faction lore you can find in game.

Mixed recruitment system
– Global recruitment is still disabled as for usual dark elven factions.
– Regular recruitment is available only on Black Arks – only dark elven units and some foreign heroes.
– Warband recruitment is available in all provinces and presented by unique for every region unit pools – you can find wild beasts and monsters in appropriate climate zones, ogres in their homeland or some big ports as well as Norscan reavers, mercenaries of Clan Eshin in Cathay or crew rats and storm-vermarines of Clan Skurvy near Tilea and Estalia. You can even recruit some smart enough orcs – blue-faced pirate orcs near Black Gulf or black orcs in their wastes. Infamous humans are also presented by pirates, slavers and some mercs. Your settlement buildings provide additional units to those pools – dark elven units, armed slaves and ogre manhunters are present here.
– Instant recruitment – you can buy armed slaves or some war beasts at Black Market and they will be available for instant recruitment for any army.

Black Market
– Buy rare and unique items for various resources and gold (many items are brand new).
– Buy personal slaves (followers, many are brand new).
– Buy armed slaves and war beasts for instant recruitment.

Warband Upgrade system
You can upgrade some units with enough exp to their more powerful variants. They are divided by 5 thematic categories – regulars (dark elves), mercs, monsters and beasts, armed slaves and pirates (port units). These categories are needed only because of limited UI field.

Vampire Coast features: Infamy, Treasure hunting, Pieces of Eight, Sea Shanty, Pirate Coves, Fleet Offices
– Thanks to Rhox and his Vampire Coast features for Lokhir Fellheart mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2904301521. All these features are available for The Black Sun Fleet. ATTENTION: only your lords can dig for treasures beacuse I failed to make a proper script for heroes. But you do not lose your movement and combine digging with channeling.

Unit Infamy Upgrade system
You can upgrade all units except base armed slaves with 1 of 3 different effects for infamy cost (similar to Greenskins scrap upgrades).

Boarding Black Arks
You can gain a new Black Ark if you defeat enemy Black Ark and it will not flee.

Black Arks for captured major ports
Feature similar to Lokhir’s one.

Restricted settlement tiers and buildings
You can only have t4-t5 settlements in major ports. Other major settlements will be t3 but with full buildings list, minor settlements will have restricted buildings list. It is made to change gameplay from brainless expanse for naval horde travelling with holding key points.

Six dark elven rites
You can make sacrifices to Cytharai and gain bonuses as other dark elven factions, but here you have access to six of them instead of four. Don’t miss scroll buttons!

New army skill line for lords (red line)
It is unique for The Black Sun Fleet lords and needed because of heavy mixed roster.

Plenty of new units, including 10 new RoR’s

New lord types
Sorcerer (metal, fire, death, dark, shadows) and Black Ark Fleetmaster + reskin for High Beastmasters.
All Sorcerer variants have different stats, attributes, weapon sets and mounts. Black Ark Fleetmaster has access to 2 mounts.

New hero types
– Wayfinder – scout support for armies, ranged stalk unit without mounts. He is a norscan merc, so can be found in port buildings.
– Warlock (fire, dark, death) – hero wizard with 2 mounts including Dark Pegasus. He is a human acolyte of sorcerers and can be recruited from sorcery buildings. He has unique skill line associated with Dhar’s possession.
– Weapon swap function for Khainite Assassin – now he can equip dual swords via mount menu.

Legendary lord that have access to Black Ark features, but can move on land

8 unique heroes and 1 unique lord
They all can be gained for missions’ completion. Unique lord also has access to Black Ark features and has unique spell line (so total 2 lords with that feature for faction).

New tech tree

– Incompatible with popular overhauls like SFO, Radious etc. Because it is fully custom faction and it is absent there. Maybe it is possible to add my faction to these mods by submodding but I do not have in plans to do that.
– Most of vanilla units reskins should work fine.
– This mod is datacoring the only file – victory_conditions.lua. So there could be issues with victory conditions if you use a mod that is also datacoring it.

Thanks to the following wonderful people from the Da Modding Den community who tolerated my constant questions and helped me solve problems:
Mixu, Rhox, Drazhir, All Is Dust, Deco, ChaosRobie, Acephelos, Pear, Stratovarius, Groove Wizard, Darth Alpharius, grackul, CJ3200, Jangry, The Duke, ZioCru.
Also thanks to Ki Adi Hoontang for his male wardancers animations that I took from his mod: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2886110459.

Compatibility with IEE, thanks to Ar_An https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3207557589

I would appreciate any support in those hard times, so feel free to subscribe here:
[boosty.to].
All my WH3 mods are here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2891468230