Force Of Nature – Druid and Dryad Overhaul

Okay, I did the dwarfen salesman bit once. I’m not doing with the hippie factions. Deal with it.

Originally, this started out as just some tweaks for the Druid class to help it out a bit in the early game and provide it with thematic terraforming, but I’ve gone and expanded it a fair bit further since then thanks to a bit of brainstorming. Now the mod encompasses both the Druid and Dryad and basically qualifies as an overhaul for each, even though the scope is fairly minor.

The druid section of the mod is focused on early game survival and some mid-game utility/survival boosts, whereas the Dryad section is more focused on late game boosts and planeshifting, though this is subject to change as I think of ever more insane ideas.

Druid

• The druid has an improved starting army to make holding at least a small patch of forests possible in most cases. Druid troops are still trash, though.
• Vergobrets and barechested scouts have 4 AP now, with Vergobrets also having access to lvl 1 druid rituals at an increased cost. More on that below.
• An expanded roster of rituals focused around bringing greenery back to the world, and for accessing some new units.
• Vergobrets now serve a function past the earliest stages of the game in that they can be used to plant of revive forests and jungles.
• Courtesy of the Allfather himself, the Druid has access to an excellent pair of scouts that double as light thugs.
• If Treebeard was smart, he would’ve just smashed Saruman’s tower with boulders from afar. In that vein, I present Smart Treebeard™, the newest SC available to the Druid class. While expensive, this new SC provides a giant artillery piece for the giant-themed SC roster available to Druids in the endgame.

Dryad

• Dryads have access to a similar set of terraforming rituals as druids that cost more and terraform faster. This is to balance against the much lower ability of Dryads to have more ritual casters.
• Dryads now have easy – though expensive – access to the primal plane and mass regeneration.
• The Dryad starting army was improved to give Dryads a little more variety in expansion options. Though troop quality has not improved overall, the presence of a centaur commander brings with it earlier access to centaurs.
• A new late-game summoning ritual gives Dryads access to a new, appropriately tree-y SC.

There shouldn’t be any compatibility issues save for with Extra Rituals (the result will just be some nearly identical rituals for Druid). Just be wary about using mods that change existing features for Druid and Dryad (that’s only mine for now).

Thankfully, no issues that I suspect at present. Everything is relatively straightforward with these two classes as I did not feel any drastic measures were needed to improve them. Balance on the new SC’s will be monitored more closely when I have some free time, but they should be middling as SC’s go due to their poor accuracy.

Special thanks to Emperor Herb for the mad scientist talks that led to the development of Entillery and the Barbed Ent.

Finally, apologies to anyone who was using the Druid Tweaks mod. I had to delete it in order to change the name.

I’m currently in the process of making overhauls for every single faction in CoE 5 and I plan to eventually port over the Warhammer Fantasy Battles mods for Dominions 4-5 over to CoE (a sizeable undertaking, only barely in the planning stages).

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