This is a guide to creating AI pretender templates to contribute to the forthcoming Pantheon mod.

Pantheon will be a library of AI pretender templates designed to be compatible with Dominions Enhanced and the Divinitus enhanced pretenders mods.

This guide provides step by step instructions for the novice modder so anyone can create challenging AI pretenders and contribute to the Pantheon mod. The submitted pretenders will be combined into a single mod, which we can all then play.

The first version of Pantheon will be released as soon as a couple of pretenders for each EA nation have been submitted. Further updates will be released as new batches of submissions have come in.

So, the sooner you start sending in those templates, the sooner the mod will be released!

If you're experienced at creating AI pretender templates, you'll already know much of the guide contents. Please do check out the design principles section though, to ensure your templates are compatible with Pantheon design rules. You may also find the tables of bless commands and global enchantments useful, too.

Pantheon aims for pretenders that are fun and challenging to fight against. Pretenders that shore up some of the AI's weaknesses and make enemy AI nations distinctive and memorable opponents.

Pretender designs should aim to:

• Help the AI with its often poor expansion
  
• Make AI nations dangerous to fight, with strong scales and blesses
  
• Be defensively very strong, or immobile, to avoid the AI tendency to get its pretenders killed
  
• Be usable by the relatively dumb Dominions AI. The AI won't employ anything more than basic strategies, so pretenders should not rely on anything even slightly complex. Please avoid designs that anticipate using path boosters, summoning other mages, equipping specific items or similar strategies that human players do as a matter of course
  
• Cheat like hell - AI templates don't have to follow all the normal rules of pretender creation, although they do need to follow some. Check out the section on how to create a template to see the crazy things you can get up to
  
• Be distinctive and thematic for the nation

For the first release of Pantheon, the scope of template submissions is limited to:

• Only Dominions Enhanced compatible Divinitus pretenders
  
• Only Early Age (EA) nations
  
• A flat 25 points worth of blesses, no matter what the pretender's path scores
  
• Pretenders must have at least one point in the path(s) required for their blesses, but do not need to have the path scores normally required for their blesses. A pretender with paths of Nature 1 Earth 1 can be given Larger and Regeneration, for example
  
• Normal pretenders only - no pretenders designed for disciple games

Please restrict your pretender submissions to follow the guidelines listed above.

Creating a Pantheon pretender template is straight forward, and doesn't require extensive modding knowledge.

The steps of creating your template are:

• Get set up with the Dominions Enhanced and Divinitus mods
  
• Create the basic pretender using the in-game pretender designer
  
• Save the pretender as a template by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+S
  
• Open your newly created template with a text editor (Notepad, Notepad++ or anything you like really)
  
• Add blesses to the template by simply copying lines from the bless list in this guide and pasting them into your template
  
• Optionally target your pretender to try to cast particular global enchantments by simply copying two lines from the global lists in this guide and pasting them into your template
  
• Copy your entire template text file and paste it into the Pantheon submissions thread here
  
• That's everything!

Firstly, make sure you have subscribed to both Dominions Enhanced and Divinitus in the workshop.

Dominions Enhanced

Divinitus

The next steps are:

• Launch the game
  
• Select 'Mods' from the main menu
  
• Left click on the latest version of Dominions Enhanced (currently 2.10)
  
• Note that the mods list sorts version numbers as decimals so 2.10 will be above 2.2, even though it's a much later version
  
• It's a big mod so it will take a few seconds to load before your screen becomes responsive again
  
• Left click on the latest version of Divinitus (currently 2.15DE)
  
• Make sure you choose the DE version of Divinitus
  
• The activation order is important - you must activate Dominions Enhanced before Divinitus
  
• Finally, click Exit to return to the main menu

You're now ready to create your first AI pretender!

• Select Tools & Manuals from the Dominions main menu
  
• Select Create a Pretender God
  
• Select Early Ages (Pantheon is starting out with just EA pretenders)
  
• Select the nation you're designing the pretender for
  
• Select Physical Form (Immobile, Titan or Monster only)
  
• Select Imprisonment (Awake or Dormant only)
  
• Set magic paths
  
• Set scales
  
• Set dominion score
  
• Don't take any blesses! Just leave your bless points unused
  
• Double check points are zero or positive - the pretender won't work properly if you save them with a negative score
  
• Press CTRL+SHIFT+S to save your pretender as a template
  
• Click on Filename:godtemplate.txt at the top of the screen
  
• Enter a unique name for your pretender design
  
• Click OK
  
• This will take you back to your design, so you can create several variants of the same pretenders or several pretenders for the same nation, saving each under a different name
  
• When you're done creating base pretenders, click Cancel then Exit to get back to the main game menu
  
• You can close Dominions if you want at this point, the final bits of your design will be done in a text editor, but it's often helpful to leave the game on the pretender design screen in case you need to check what paths and scales you picked while you're selecting blesses

Tips for basic pretender design for the AI:

Generally, avoid physical forms that have major negative effects, like population killing or raising unrest. The AI won't handle them well. If the nation has strong sacreds, an immobile is a good idea so the AI can't get it killed and lose incarnate blesses. For nations with weak/no recruitable sacreds, a monster or titan is often a good choice.

Usually avoid rainbow mage (anything with starting dominion 1) pretenders as the AI can't really use them. You might create one as an awake or dormant super researcher, but there are usually titans that can do the same thing (adept researcher and/or inspiring researcher).

The AI combat script for high hp units like titans and monsters is nearly always 'cast twice then attack'. They don't sit at the back casting even in huge battles, so you want to ensure your titans and monsters will be good in melee even in the mid-late game. Some form of AOE effect (fear, heat/cold aura, fire shield etc.) is a good idea if they don't have an inherent AOE weapon like dragon breath.

Generally you want the pretender awake. Pantheon AI pretenders get 25 points worth of bless no matter their paths, so you can keep paths just high enough to cast some decent combat magic and still have good scales with an awake pretender. If you're designing the pretender to be a global caster and they need very high paths, you might want to make them dormant/imprisoned, but generally the AI really wants some strong incarnate blesses online in order to help it expand. It's not very good at expansion.

The AI is pretty reluctant to expand with its pretender, so it's worth trying to give expander pretenders blesses that are also decent on the the national sacreds. That way the AI still gets good benefits even if it decides to leave your killer pretender sitting in the lab researching.

For scales, it's generally a good idea to avoid misfortune. The AI doesn't deal with bad events well. Sloth should usually be avoided too, unless all the nation's troops have very low resource costs. High sloth tends to make the AI recruit lots of very bad independent troops, instead of good national troops and/or sacreds. Because these pretenders get 25 free bless points, they don't need huge magic paths unless they're going to be a global caster, so most Pantheon pretenders should have pretty good to excellent scales.

Randomly throwing in some heat and cold is often a good idea. Having enemy nations with varying temperature scales makes for a varied game when the human player(s) play as temperature sensitive nations like Abysia or Niefelheim.

For any nations with neutral temperature or heat scales and a pretender with a water path, adding a swimming or water breathing bless is often a good idea. The AI often gets stuck behind rivers during expansion if the nation doesn't have cold scales. Mountain survival on nations with cold scales is good for the same reason, but getting over rivers is usually more important than traversing mountain passes.

Dominion score can be whatever you think best. The AI spams temples like crazy so can get by on low dominion, but it will need holy points to recruit sacreds and you're going to have a killer bless...

Don't take any blesses for now. Leave your bless points unspent. You'll add blesses in the next section.

If you've followed the steps so far, you will have created a text file containing the basis of your pretender template in your mods folder.

If you're not sure where your mods folder is:

• Click "Tools & Manuals" in the Dominions main menu
  
• Click "Open User Data Directory"
  
• A window will open outside the game
  
• Select the 'mods' folder in this window
  
• Your template will be a text file called whatever you named it during the save process
  
• Open the template using your choice of text editor, Notepad is fine

When you open it, the template should look like this:

#newtemplate 10
#form "Duiu of Farming (3080)"
#prison 0
#magic 2 3
#magic 3 3
#magic 6 5
#domstr 7
#scale 0 -2
#scale 2 1
#scale 5 -1
#end

This example is a Duiu of Farming for Fomoria - he's got Water 3/Earth 3/Nature 5 paths which will make him a dangerous self buffer, and he can take regeneration and quickness blesses which I'll add next.

Next you copy #bless effects from the list in this guide and paste them into the template, directly above the #end.

The Bless Command List section of this guide lists all the allowed bless commands to give your AI pretender their bless. Copy the lines for the blessings you want and paste them into the pretender template you generated from the Dominions pretender designer.

Make sure you paste each bless command on a separate line and it must be above the final #end command at the bottom of your template.

Your pretender must have at least 1 point in the blessing path(s) and meet the scales requirements of the bless, if any.

The total points value of all blessings should add up to 25. Ignore whatever bless points your pretender's paths would normally give them, and just pick 25 points of blessings from the paths the pretender knows. This is why you don't add blessings during the in-game pretender designer step.

Some of the Divinitus pretenders have 'Paths start X higher when choosing blessings' as their special ability. If you're using one of those, give them an extra 2 points worth of blessings per point of X. So the Statue of Creation that gets 'Nature and Earth paths start two higher when choosing blessings' should get an extra 8 bless points (4 for each path) for a total of 33 blessing points.

For blessings that can be taken multiple times, repeat the bless line as many times as you want the bless taken, so to get a +3 attack skill bless you'd paste the following into your template:

#bless "Attack Skill" -- 2 Points
#bless "Attack Skill" -- 2 Points
#bless "Attack Skill" -- 2 Points

Generally speaking, aggressive blesses are more fun to play against than super defensive blesses. It's usually a good idea for your bless to have big strengths and big weaknesses.

For nations that don't really use sacred troops, go for a mage bless or a thug bless for their commanders, or come up with a bless that will make the pretender themselves a dangerous supercombatant. Because every pretender gets 25 bless points, even strong scales pretenders should have a vicious bless.

FIRE
#bless "Superior Morale" -- 1 Points
#bless "Wasteland Survival" -- 1 Point
#bless "Fire Resistance" -- 2 Points
#bless "Attack Skill" -- 2 Points
#bless "Inspirational Presence" -- 3 Points
#bless "Righteous Wrath" -- 4 Points
#bless "Death Explosion" -- 6 Points + Requires Death path
#bless "Heat Aura" -- 5 Points Incarnate
#bless "Fire Shield" -- 5 Points Incarnate
#bless "Flaming Weapons" -- 6 Points Incarnate
#bless "Unbearable Splendour" -- 12 Points Incarnate + Requires Astral path

AIR
#bless "Precision" -- 1 Point
#bless "Shock Resistance" -- 2 Points
#bless "Farshot" -- 2 Points
#bless "Awareness" -- 2 Points
#bless "Swiftness" -- 3 Points
#bless "Storm Flight" -- 3 Points
#bless "Weightlessness" -- 4 Points + Requires Earth path
#bless "Wind Walker" -- 5 Points Incarnate
#bless "Air Shield" -- 5 Points Incarnate
#bless "Thunder Weapons" -- 7 Points Incarnate
#bless "Charged Bodies" -- 7 Points Incarnate
#bless "Flight" -- 8 Points Incarnate

WATER
#bless "Winter's Gift" -- 1 Point + Requires Cold scale 1+
#bless "Swamp Survival" -- 1 Point
#bless "Swimming" -- 1 Point
#bless "Cold Resistance" -- 2 Points
#bless "Defence Skill" -- 2 Points
#bless "Water Breathing" -- 2 Points
#bless "Slowing Weapons" -- 6 Points + Requires Glamour path
#bless "Frost Mist Weapons" -- 5 Points + Requires Air path and Cold scale 1+
#bless "Chill Aura" -- 5 Points Incarnate
#bless "Vitriol Weapons" -- 7 Points Incarnate + Requires Fire path
#bless "Quickness" -- 9 Points Incarnate + Requires Magic scale 1+

EARTH
#bless "Mountain Survival" -- 1 Point
#bless "Reinvigoration" -- 2 Points
#bless "Strength of the Earth" -- 2 Points
#bless "Unbreakable" -- 3 Points
#bless "Larger" -- 7 Points + Requires Nature path
#bless "Reconstruction" -- 5 Points Incarnate
#bless "Resilience of the Earth" -- 5 Points Incarnate
#bless "Hard Skin" -- 5 Points Incarnate
#bless "Fortitude" -- 7 Points Incarnate

ASTRAL
#bless "Arcane Command" -- 1 Point
#bless "Magic Resistance" -- 2 Points
#bless "Solar Weapons" -- 3 Points + Requires Fire path
#bless "Spirit Sight" -- 4 Points + Requires Death path
#bless "Far Caster" -- 4 Points
#bless "Arcane Finesse" -- 4 Points
#bless "Magic Weapons" -- 5 Points Incarnate
#bless "Twist Fate" -- 5 Points Incarnate
#bless "Fateweaving" -- 6 Points Incarnate + Requires Misfortune scale 1+
#bless "Etherealness" -- 8 Points Incarnate + Requires Magic scale 2+

DEATH
#bless "Undying" -- 1 Point
#bless "Undead Command" -- 1 Point
#bless "Half Dead" -- 2 Points + Requires Death scale 2+
#bless "Mending Bones" -- 3 Points
#bless "Withering Weapons" -- 4 Points
#bless "Reanimators" -- 6 Points + Requires Earth path
#bless "Stygian Flesh" -- 5 Points Incarnate
#bless "Reforming Flesh" -- 6 Points Incarnate
#bless "Death Weapons" -- 6 Points Incarnate
#bless "Fear" -- 8 Points Incarnate + Requires Turmoil scale 1+

NATURE
#bless "Resilient" -- 1 Point
#bless "Low Light Vision" -- 1 Point
#bless "Forest Survival" -- 1 Point
#bless "Poison Resistance" -- 2 Points
#bless "Unaging" -- 3 Points + Requires Magic scale 1+
#bless "Poison Weapons" -- 3 Points + Requires Death scale 1+
#bless "Berserker" -- 5 Points + Requires Blood path
#bless "Recuperation" -- 5 Points Incarnate
#bless "Barkskin" -- 5 Points Incarnate
#bless "Regeneration" -- 7 Points Incarnate

GLAMOUR
#bless "Undreaming" -- 1 Point
#bless "Heroism" -- 1 Point
#bless "Quiet Stride" -- 2 Points
#bless "True Sight" -- 3 Points
#bless "Blur" -- 3 Points
#bless "Obfuscate" -- 5 Points Incarnate
#bless "Awe" -- 7 Points Incarnate + Requires Fire path
#bless "Displacement" -- 6 Points Incarnate
#bless "Dread" -- 7 Points Incarnate + Requires Magic scale 1+
#bless "Luck" -- 8 Points Incarnate + Requires Luck scale 2+

BLOOD
#bless "Strong Vitae" -- 1 Point
#bless "Strength of the Flesh" -- 2 Points
#bless "Strong Blood" -- 3 Points
#bless "Enchanted Blood" -- 4 Points
#bless "Blood Surge" -- 4 Points
#bless "Blood Bond" -- 5 Points Incarnate
#bless "Unholy Weapons" -- 6 Points Incarnate
#bless "Vampiric Weapons" -- 10 Points Incarnate + Requires Death path
#bless "Blood Vengeance" -- 7 Points Incarnate

Your template should now look like this:

#newtemplate 10
#form "Duiu of Farming (3080)"
#prison 0
#magic 2 3
#magic 3 3
#magic 6 5
#domstr 7
#scale 0 -2
#scale 2 1
#scale 5 -1
#bless "Regeneration" -- 7 Points Incarnate
#bless "Quickness" -- 9 Points Incarnate + Requires Magic scale 1+
#bless "Reinvigoration" -- 2 Points
#bless "Reinvigoration" -- 2 Points
#bless "Reinvigoration" -- 2 Points
#bless "Reinvigoration" -- 2 Points
#bless "Winter's Gift" -- 1 Point + Requires Cold scale 1+
#end

I've given the Duiu regeneration and quickness, then 4x Reinvigoration as those quickened giants in heavy armour are going to burn fatigue like crazy. That left one point left over so I've added Winter's Gift to make them move a bit faster in the cold scale I gave the Duiu.

Note that the total value of the blesses I've added is 25 points.

If you want to you could add global targets to your pretender, but they're not needed. See the Optional Global Spell guidelines in the next section for more information.

When you're happy with your blesses, and global targets if you're using them, copy the text of the entire template to your clipboard and paste it into the Pantheon contributions thread in the Mods forum of the Dominions 6 Steam discussions:

Pantheon Contributions Thread

And that's it!

That was fun wasn't it - why not do another pretender?

You can create pretenders that are designed to give the AI access to specific global enchantments. If you want your pretender to focus on casting one or more global spells:

• Make sure the pretender has the required paths to cast the global. You can't rely on the AI using boosters, empowerment etc. so give the pretender high enough scores in their base path(s) to cast the global.
  
• The AI tends to only get a lot of gems for their national paths, so generally it's good to pick globals that match the nation's national gem income
  
• If you're designing a global caster, you generally want to make it an immobile. This makes it much less likely the AI will get the pretender killed and lose the global enchantment
  
• Make sure the globals you want to cast are available to the nation you are designing the pretender for - see the globals lists in the next sections

For each global you want the pretender to target:

• Find the global enchantment in the global spell lists (the next section of the guide)
  
• Check the nation and path requirements to be sure your pretender can cast it
  
• Copy the table entry Paste Line 1 for your chosen global
  
• Paste this into your pretender template on a single line before the final #end command
  
• Copy the table entry Paste Line 2 for your chosen global
  
• Paste this into your pretender template on a single line immediately under the line you just pasted
  
• This will make the pretender's nation prioritise the research required for the global, and then try and cast it whenever they can, so long as they don't have control of the global and have the required gems
  
• If you add multiple globals in different research paths, the AI will prioritise researching them in the order you put them in your template

Globals for non EA nations have been included for completeness. For the time being, Pantheon is limited to EA pretender templates, so pretenders designed to access MA and LA only globals should not be attempted.

This guide is designed to be usable by those unfamiliar with Dominions modding, to try and get as many people as possible involved.

If you're more experienced, feel free to do more creative stuff!

I'd especially appreciate more developed templates for research goals for specific nations, strong early research goals grouped by magic path to give access to key self buffs, and pretenders designed to exploit a particular series of summons.

The key commands are:

#researchgoal "spell name" | "item name"

This will make the AI research to get access to this spell or
magic item. Many researchgoal can be set, in which case the AI
will research to get them in that order. The AI's research might
not be exactly like ordered, but it will mostly follow the plans.


#favrit <disschool> <level> "ritual name" | "item name"

Makes the AI prioritize casting this ritual or forging this magic
item. Many favrit commands can be used to make the AI
prioritize multiple things. Disschool and level can be set to -1,-1
to never disable this favorite. Otherwise school should be a
spell school and level a research level, when the AI reaches this
the command will be disabled.

It would be awesome to build up a library of #researchpath commands for particular nations and specific combat pretender paths. I can then add these to the more 'bare bones' submissions that come in and make all the pretenders awesome.