INTRODUCTION:
I tried to create a race, that would offer an original gameplay experience compared with the clonic factions we have right now with the ingmae editor. I used my favourite race in MoM, the lizardmen, as bace concept: a race which grows quick and has good map control due to being amphibious. I ended up mixing some concepts from Lovecraft's Cthulhu to spice things up as I like them and fits with aquatic race idea.
UNIQUE GAMEPLAY FEATURES:
- Decent strategic regeneration of 3 mana per turn for all your units when using this race!
- Base lizardmen starting unit with tactical regeneration, but only 3 hp instead of the normal 5, so you can't tak emuch advantadge of it in early battles.
- Base unit also helps with food and prestige production if it stays inside city (5% bonus to both, need to test if this scales when creating squads- tested, it doesn't scale, works as intended)
- Expensive shaman unit with Sion-like abilities, that enhances prestige further and provides more arcane research, it can also be customized. The required building for them is a temple, where blood sacrifices take place, decreasing prestige by 5 and effectively halting all growth on the city. This reflects the precolombine tendency of indigenous races to hunt people for their sacrifices in minor villages, this view comes from novels and books, so forgive me if it's wrong 
- Monster units (Dragon turtles and leviathan) unlocked in cities through the new buildings, without requiring extra overland resource tiles like other monsters in the game, but they require food to be built and have food maintenance. They are quite cheap for what they do, so the food limitation balances them.
- 2 Food producing buildings to simulate their race's quick growth and to help feed the above monsters
- Fast expanding and bigger Zone of Control for lizardmen cities.
- Skath mounts (thanks to Gnilbert for the idea and knowledge to do this!), which require food to be allowed to be built, find a compromise between expanding your empire and training big squads with those mounts!
- Only 1st level of house, it will take more food to get high lvl cities, this helps to compensate for the food producing buildings
- Amphibious units! may be the answer to an AI that doesn't know how to use ships, so you get a competent enemy in island maps (needs testing to see if the AI is actually competent using this)
- Customizable caravans to allow you to design an assassin able to move deep into enemy territory for a surprise attack or simply to defend themselves from wandering monsters, no mroe caravans dying at the start of the turn without being able to do nothing about it.
- You can create new units without upgrading the basic amphibious regenerating unit, if you feels it's too powerful. Males will be the usual 5 hp unit and females will be skaths . Don't worry though, lizardmen offspring will be humanoid no matter what as they have superior genetic breeding, like the shamans, which are all female.
- Necronomicon (Easter egg), leads to new economic victory!.
- Crazy city with moving tentacles at lvl 5
- All new items introduced are buyable in city! (except the accesory which is bugged for champions, so it's not vailable there, only for unit design)
- Lots of stuff I'm surely forgetting, but need to get screenies and mod up and writing this is taking forever, but unexplained features are somwhat useless aren't they?
- Extend your cult and search for those who followed the Call of Cthulu (tech research, which decreases diplomatic capital), once you decipher the secrets of the Dreaming One, you will be able to awaken R'lyeh. You'll most likely need to get contacts around the whole world to achieve this or learn the whole cooperation/diplomacy tree. This should be an option to experiment with the diplomatic aspect of the game (you need diplomatic capital to get the sunken city built).
- Strategic regeneration of health to full life each turn
- Unique housing with no cost, but only increases population cap by 5
MOD SUMMARY:
- 5 new units
- 2 new NPC champions, that START WITH MANA
- 5 new techs ( 1 researchable to get firebreathing weapon / imbued fire, the other one was an starting tech used to define racial goodies)
- 2 new weapons (1 needs research)
- 1 new accesory (needs research)
- Complete designs for all cityhubs levels, 2 different ones for level 1 (6 tiles)
- Complete designs for exclusive new wallset of swampy ruins (14 tiles)
- 4 New buildings (3 tiles,1 construction tile for pyramid, reuse game tiles for other construction tiles)
- Redesigned tile for houses (1 tile)
- Many new icons, faction logo and new backgrounds for designed units
TOTAL: 26 new tiles
SCREENIES!:
Answers are coming..
New buildings:
Reduced 61%
Original 855 x 720
NewCityHubs:
Reduced 54%
Original 1042 x 712
Close up on some details of lvl 5 city (still nothing like seeing it ingame moving the tentacled parts 
)
Reduced 59%
Original 855 x 737
Early version of lvl 5 city:
Cthulhu roaming the world:
Reduced 85%
Original 640 x 512
Cthulhu duel (You could get a controllable one in the development version)
Reduced 85%
Original 640 x 512
City wallset of swamp ruins in action: (may need to change them, as they have many objects, please provide feedback), it's an ugly example, but it was the only screen I had already made so
Reduced 48%
Original 1165 x 712
The sunken city of R'lyeh emerges from the beneath the earth and floods my poor village
Close up on the center of the city:
CHANGELOG :
- Fixed crash related to techs appearing before categories in the custom tech tree
- Changed game effects of the Lizard Lake Settlement and added tech requirement
- Added sunken cities and related tech, massive 2x2 Full tiles sized design (the building itself is only one tile of course)
- Added shadows for tiles, which were missing before
- Now uses the new mod structure from 1.09 to make it easier to keep my mod appart (you will need to delete old files)
TO DO:
Redesign middle cityhub designs (lvl 3,4)
Implement new technologies
Neverending balancing of more broken things once I get feedback, it was enough work to get it working, when I started. As the game will radically change over the new patches, finetune balancing isn't needed / worth the effort
Release minor factions of lizardmen, probably as standalone mod replacing original minor factions, as we can't control the number or which minor factions appear
Implement reward /victory for killing cthulhu (right now, he can only be hit with bows and it's likely to wipe armies in one turn, so goodluck with that)
Improved IA for Cthulhu so he attacks cities instead of randomly moving around...
Fix exploits, in the meanwhile pretend they don't exist or abuse them fully, depending on your preferences XDDD
DOWNLOAD:
Core files of the mod (1,7MB):
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2613529/Elemental/LizardmenFiles.zip
Optional new backgrounds (4,5MB)
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2613529/Elemental/CthuluBG.zip
Instructions:
As always extract these files in the Elemental folder inside your personal document folder. Respect the existing structure inside the zip so units get unzipped into your Units folder and so on. Alternatively all xmls can go into Units folder, I'm almost sure icons must go to Units/Icons. Alternatively you can unzip into your mod folder where game is installed, and activate "Use Mods" option inside the game. I don't use this last option so won't be bale to answer questions regarding it...
KNOWN EXPLOITS / BUGS / EASTER EGGS (don't read if you don't want to be spoiled, highlight to see):
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lol my keyboard got out of battery when I was tipying this section, XDDD
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- Sovereigns starting with mount cannot get rid of it ever, only change them. Why is this a problem? Becuase mounted units get slower combat animations, specially with ranged attacks and in many instances the special effects won't even show. In some cases the xml for the mounted sovereign also get a missing correct model, so they won't work right if you comment the mount afterwards! beware using mounts in sovereign customization!.
- Sovereigns starting with a weapon suffer from the same bug (this is true for every item, I think) also there's a secondary bug with this mod. If you use the new firebreath weapon with your sovereign and he had another starting weapon, the range will be overrided with the original weapon one, instead of 4 tiles. So if you had a bow, your firebreath will have 8 range for example.
- The Necronomicon can be bought at all city lvls, 1-4 will be a version that summons a roaming Cthulhu monster, that will move randomly around and it also drains your resources massively, have fun trying to hunt this godly monster. You can try setting him free near enemy territory for some fun, beware it will lay waste to your armies and cities if you have bad luck (it's not very inteligent). Lvl 5 version will grant you a new type of victory (Economic one, as it will cost 10K gold, it actually uses the code and video for the Spell victory)
- Exploit derived from above point: you can buy any item in the shop whenyou have negative money, it's a problem with the game, so I don't think I can fix it
- Amphibious units: actually they're flying ones and can go over mountains, but didn't want to play with terrains to avoid mod conflicts in the future.
- Shaman cost doesn't get changed when edited, maybe it needs a higher base cost to take this into account
- Shaman designs don't retain the buildingrequirement in their code, so this can be exploited to build them in other cities or in a new game...
- Female new units will have a clipping problem and also may be overpowered if equiped with certain weapons, must find a way to limit their customization options
