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DarthRoblox posted:They’re new in dominions 6 - I’ll do a proper intro later, but they’re basically semi-civilized cave tribes who have been tempted into blood-based shenanigans by goat-men. They are semi-civilized by Middle Age? I guess cave-goat-people aren't the best researchers.
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Apr 27, 2024 15:56
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Kanthulhu posted:They are semi-civilized by Middle Age? I guess cave-goat-people aren't the best researchers. I'd say they're pretty advanced by MA standards. They get good crossbowmen and their sheep knights are well armored and surprisingly strong. Absolutely abysmal magic resistance, though.
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Apr 27, 2024 18:00
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Good Nature and Blood, plus crossbowmen? Sounds like a pretty powerful nation to me.
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Apr 27, 2024 18:27
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As implied by the name, Pyrene draws from the folklore of the Basque people who live in the region of the Pyrenees that define the border between Spain and France.
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Apr 27, 2024 19:11
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They also have pretty well armored greatswords and sword and board for line infantry. And their other mages are good at blasting away with Air magic (which has pretty good battle magic for both blasting and some army support). And their sacred sheep knights are pretty good (but nowhere near as good as Knights of Avalon, not like I'm biased or anything), but as mentioned are let down by their mounts having ABYSMAL magic resistance. Another nation with half decent N can easily Charm Animal the goats, which causes them to kick off their rider and change sides. They have an MR of 5, average is 10. I almost launched into a rant on how good Knights of Avalon are, but I'll hold off until I become relevant. Darthroblox can probably articulate it better anyway! IthilionTheBrave fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Apr 28, 2024 |
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Apr 27, 2024 19:13
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Turn 14 A fairly quiet turn aside from the battles - some turns you get 10 random events, other times barely any. The event this turn is in our cap, and it's a bit of fun flavor: Each ~year (12 turns), Phaeacia gets a contingent of these dudes, honoring the ancient pact. These are proper giants, size 6 (out of 10), 2 larger than our colossi. They're led by a Lochos, this fine fella: He's a very solid combatant - decent protection, magic armor and weapons, lots of HP and skill. One gripe I have with these guys is that they can't actually sail as a unit ability. That means that for now, this guy and his seven buddies (they're basically the same troop, just with mundane equipment instead of magic) are going to just hang out in our capital. We're sailing some priests in to the mainland this turn to try and get dark sails up and running. Onto the actual fights! First up, a scout observes T'ien Ch'i's PG chow down on some indies - nothing new there. We do see it cast personal stoneskin and strength of giants, which are Alteration 2 and Enchantment 1 spells, telling us TC has focused research towards buffing their god for now. Useful info to file away. Next up, we have our trash mercs running into a decent amount of PD. Luckily it's low-armor tribe PD, so we can actually hurt them. It's a messy affair, with both sides taking plenty of losses. Foul spawn put out a decent amount of damage since they have 2 attacks each (every unit gets to use all of it's attacks each round, so these guys hit twice). They start to trickle through to the backlines. Eventually they manage to attrition down the PD to the point where it breaks, handing us a win. A few losses, but absolutely acceptable for a 40 gold investment. The province alone will pay for that cost in a turn, and it makes sure that TC can't snipe it before we could otherwise get to it. I don't really have a use for these guys after this, so I'll likely run them into the nearby throne province to scout out what kind of troops are in it. Onto the real fight for the turn: On our side, a fairly similar arrangement to the fight against Phlegra's PG, if a bit lighter on troops due to leaving some behind to keep the capital under siege. Phlegra's side is a little chaotic - I'm not actually sure if this is the previous player's arrangement before they went AI, or if this is what the AI chose to do. Either way, the troops are fairly spread out and are likely to run into our lines pretty piecemeal. We also get a look at Phlegra's prophet, I'd hit *that* with a club. Take a look at that damage, 44 damage on a 13 attack club is actually pretty formidable. Combined with the extra HP for being a prophet in friendly dominion, and this guy could actually be fairly rough. Very little protection though. The initial clash is between the gigante squads and our guard - the tyrants are sitting in the back and self-buffing. This isn't great for the gigantes - they don't have the highest attack and our guard have pretty good defense. A few rounds on, and we can see two status effects on the gigantes. The pink-ish looking ones have gone berserk (will never rout, extra attack, strength, and protection at the cost of defense and fatigue) while the grayed out looking one has been stunned by a lightning bolt. Lightning bolts do their work, and the gigantes squad is mostly cleaned up. A squad of our heavies has broken away into the enemy backlines... right as the two tyrants have finally made their way over. These guys are going to have a bad time; the tyrants will demolish them in small numbers. Despite that, our troops finish off the last of the gigantes and completely surround the farther forward tyrant. Light colossi have a tough time damaging him, but with so many incoming attacks they'll get lucky sometimes. Shortly after that the remaining PD and crossbow troops break, leaving just the berserk tyrant and cyclops prophet left on the field. They last for a bit due to protection and HP, but we manage to spear and bolt them down eventually. And with that, we've traded a few light and heavy Colossi for the remaining forces Phlegra has on the field. Our scouts can see the rest of their lands and there's only a few random troops here and there, mostly survivors that fled previous battles. As a result, we're going hyper-aggressive here. With no remaining armies to worry about, we're going to go for the rare quintuple attack. If successful, this should claim nearly every remaining Phlegran province. We also spot a stack of spiders from Machaka to the north - those make me slightly nervous since they're fairly nasty sacreds. After reaching out to Machaka's player though we agree to stay friendly for now - a war between us would be pretty destructive to both sides, nothing like the very fast war that we just won. Each attack looks very similar to this - 10 frontline troops of mixed heavies and guard, backed by 20 or so lights. This should be more than enough to deal with even quite a lot of PD and I'm totally fine with a few losses here to secure our profit from the war. Assuming this works, we'll be in good shape to start thinking about next steps. Despite the win here, we're only still only at about 19 provinces if we take all 5 this turn. That's way better than we were doing, but in my opinion if you're not gaining territory this early on then other players are, putting you behind. We want to get a lot of forts and temples built to spread our really good scales, which means income and coastal provinces to put those forts on. While Machaka is looking tough, TC seems to be struggling a bit to fill in all of their indie provinces...
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Apr 28, 2024 21:31
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It's extremely satisfying when you clinch a strategically superior position and just have like red move arrows going everywhere as you rush the hell out of someone, either raiding them or having broken their defensive strongpoints/counterattacked and moving in to eat them up.
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Apr 28, 2024 21:44
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I've played every dominions game since 3 and didn't even know 6 was out til this LP. So, thanks!
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Apr 28, 2024 22:00
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feller posted:I've played every dominions game since 3 and didn't even know 6 was out til this LP. So, thanks! You got it! There's a few newbie-oriented lobbies actively wanting players on the discord if multiplayer is your thing.
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Apr 28, 2024 22:24
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titty_baby_ posted:mmhmm glad to see another Dom sslp Getting into this like a hot bath, hell yeah
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Apr 29, 2024 21:32
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IthilionTheBrave posted:They also have pretty well armored greatswords and sword and board for line infantry. And their other mages are good at blasting away with Air magic (which has pretty good battle magic for both blasting and some army support). And their sacred sheep knights are pretty good (but nowhere near as good as Knights of Avalon, not like I'm biased or anything), but as mentioned are let down by their mounts having ABYSMAL magic resistance. Another nation with half decent N can easily Charm Animal the goats, which causes them to kick off their rider and change sides. They have an MR of 5, average is 10. Dominions is the best comedy game. Unrelatedly, if you ever run into classic pulp book the Tritonian Ring it's worth a read, it really is Dominions fiction, our hero dude just adventuring it up in a Dominions world with warring gods being all petty and snotty with each other and weirdass armies of magical creatures. It looks like it's a series, so I imagine any of those books would be the same.
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Apr 30, 2024 00:05
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sebmojo posted:Dominions is the best comedy game. If I'm not mistaken the riders will take some damage from getting bucked off, too. I've not had a chance to actually try using this trick, though. Not yet at least.
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Apr 30, 2024 01:00
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Dominions is a pretty amazing (usually unintentional) comedy generator if viewed in the right light. The sheer number of dice rolls plus the weird dice system dominions uses creates a lot of opportunity for staggeringly unlikely things to happen more often than you'd expect. I don't remember if I've talked about it or not, but almost every stat and calculation in the game has a "dominions random number" added to it, which is basically a 2d6, exploding on 6's. So, while a unit with 10 strength hitting another with 9 protection will on average do 1 damage a poo poo, in practice you wind up seeing a surprising number of 10's or even 20's pop out (along with a lot of 0's). We'll definitely see the full effects of the RNG later on in this game, for better and for worse, but the stupid situations you wind up in due to incredible(ly bad) luck are incredibly funny once you get over the pain of losing hours of planning to a poorly placed arrow.
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Apr 30, 2024 01:39
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I want to believe dot gif
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Apr 30, 2024 01:50
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Turn 15 Lots of battles this turn, as we expected. We get a random event: Ominous? Sometimes these random events indicate something going on in the province, like a hidden heretic priest or monster boar that needs to be dealt with. I think this is just random flavor though. The unrest is mildly annoying since income is reduced by your unrest %, but it'll resolve on it's own given time. Magic is just a temporary change to the magic scale; mostly irrelevant. In non-random events, we see our first full fortress going up this turn. Forts are a significant expense, taking a total of 9 turns and 1,600 gold to build. However, in exchange you get a number of bonuses. First up, the "Admin" value is a % income bonus, and then since we're Phaeacia we get a flat 10% for being on coast, meaning this province will forever give us +40% income over a non-improved version. It also lets us recruit our national troops and mages instead of just the local independents: Forts are how we're going to build our mage corps - most forts are going to be building a captain or a weaver every turn from now on to get our research going. We'll also want a very large number of weavers later in the game due to a mechanic we're going to be relying on heavily to stay competitive - communions. Communions are their whole own topic, but they basically let mages pool their power together, reducing "slaves" (the game's terminology, not my preferred choice but...) to comatose magic batteries, who in turn empower the "masters" (yep) with improved magic. The power gained grows logarithmicly by a power of 2: 2 slaves gets you +1 path, 4 gets you +2, 8 get you +3, etc. The whole communion also shares fatigue, meaning your empowered mages can cast really big spells much longer than they'd otherwise be able to. Of course, all that power comes with a downside - your battery mages are completely defenseless and immobile, and will almost certainly die if you lose the fight. Normally, mages can often survive lost battles by simply routing and running away since they tend to be at the back. Additionally, accumulating too much fatigue will cause a mage to start taking damage instead, so blowing up a whole communion is quite easy if you're not careful. Mages can and will cast any spell they have access to once your five scripted turns run out - more than once I've won a battle, but then had it continue for 10 rounds while hunting down stragglers and meanwhile the mages in the back have their heads explode due to useless spells still being cast. Fun times! Anyways - that's a lot of words on something that's not going to be at all relevant for at least a dozen turns, so I'll revisit it when we get there. Our battles this turn go as expected - one light colossi gets unlucky, but otherwise flawless victories across the board. The random commander in Yrik Balkor was probably trying to build a fort - we could have let him finish and then stolen the fort for ourselves, but oh well - our neighbors likely would've grabbed it anyways. With that, we've actually claimed every remaining Phlegran province. Their only remaining presence on the map is their capital, which is under siege. The line in the turn messages about the capital fort being "lightly damaged" suggests it's going to take a while to get through the walls, and that there's a decent number of troops inside. I think might opt to do a dominion kill here - capital forts are quite formidable, especially this early on, but if we can reduce Phlegra's dominion score to 0 in all provinces then they're out of the game and we can simply stroll on in. It can take a while to pull off a dom kill, but hey - it's not like it's going to take 30 turns or anything, right? In other world news, we can see that Pyréne to our west is quite large. Eyeballing it, they're at least 16 provinces and we haven't seen the west side of their lands yet. We haven't seen their bless yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if they have a fairly strong one. They also appear to have expanded into the caves layer - some of their troops are cave natives, so that's not too surprising. Either way, we need to keep an eye on them - if they're as large as they look, they're in a very strong position. If I had to guess, they're likely relying on either an awake expander like Phlegra and T'ien Ch'i, and/or have a strong bless on their sacred sheep knights: These guys are quite cool flavor-wise, and also pretty strong. A common weakness of cavalry in Dominions 6 is that the horses tend to be fairly unprotected and tend to die very quickly. Not so with these sheep though - 19 protection is more than anything we can recruit has. Hopefully a scout will catch one of their battles soon so we can see what we'd be up against. We'd be in a bad spot if they attacked us right now even blessless, so hopefully their attention is elsewhere. Finally, we're going to try and grab a mercenary mage this turn. I think I mentioned this guy in the first 10 turns, but he actually shows up here. Ferrus is an astral and earth mage - both paths we have nationally, but only at lower levels. If we get lucky, he can help us break more deeply into those paths by forging booster items later on. In the short term, he'd be a nice boost to our research. Otherwise, we're sending our foul spawn mercs into the throne to get a peek at what's guarding it, and setting all of our dispersed captains to do some site searching while they're spread out. 2A1W is reasonably likely to find at least something across 5 provinces.
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Apr 30, 2024 02:31
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Honestly the Prot issue for horses is mostly gone by MA. Most of the human nations are using Destriers (Prot 20) or better, Machaka's spiders naturally have high natural prot, and even Pythium's armoring its lizards. It's mainly EA mounted units that took a big hit, along with a few other national exceptions (TC in general and LA Jomon for instance). Unless you're a chariot. Illwinter apparently hates chariots, because in general none of the horses pulling them have even light armor regardless of age.
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Apr 30, 2024 03:40
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So that one guy that died was totally a dick that got dragged, right?
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Apr 30, 2024 04:32
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Arrow to the knee, I'm afraid I don't think I've really talked about afflictions, but one of the insanely detailed things about dominions is that every single unit will slowly accrue afflictions as they engage in combat. Every time a unit takes damage, there's a percent chance that the damage results in a permanent affliction. These are things like a limp or being crippled (and then dying when you're force marched to a new province), battle fright, never healing wounds, etc etc. There's also some more temporary afflictions, like profuse bleeding. This only lasts for one battle, and continuously drains a unit's HP until the bleeding stops (and of course, the damage from bleeding has it's own chance to roll new afflictions. Fun!). For this particular fellow, the bleeding stops when he simply has no blood left in his body.
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Apr 30, 2024 04:55
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It's kind of a funny mechanic because if you're unlucky with rolls the bleeding doesn't stop after battle ends, and even larger units can just die from it. But you can lose an arm, both arms even, and it doesn't bleed.
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Apr 30, 2024 05:47
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A small thing that amuses me is that three nations that all happen to be related to each other in the lore, all happened to end up in this same game and as neighbors to each other: The Phaeacian Colossi are decendants from the Lion Clan men of Machaka, and Phaeacia and Phlegra both have descendants from the giants of Mekone. It's a detail I love about the insane worldbuilding this series has. Each nation has it's own interesting lore and history, but the world as a whole has an implied overarching narrative that plays out between the ages if you read the descriptions of nations and units as you move from early to middle to late age. Nations go to war with each other, some die, some new ones form from the remnants of others, some nations merge together, and some nations go through whole cultural shifts from events that are implied to happen between the ages. The world has a whole interconnected story that plays out on it's own if it's left to it's own devices and the Pretenders don't muck things up with their wars. I'd love to see a 'family tree' of all the nations in the game, showing how they change from age to age and how they're all connected to each other. ousire fucked around with this message at 12:13 on Apr 30, 2024 |
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Apr 30, 2024 12:10
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ousire posted:A small thing that amuses me is that three nations that all happen to be related to each other in the lore, all happened to end up in this same game and as neighbors to each other: The Phaeacian Colossi are decendants from the Lion Clan men of Machaka, and Phaeacia and Phlegra both have descendants from the giants of Mekone. Yea, the interconnectedness of the world is a big draw, it makes things feel alive and gives it a lot of flavor. There's even a little connection between Phlegra and Pyréne if you check the mouflon knight's description - both nations have the same magnificent sheep. If we hadn't rudely ended them, Phlegra even could've starting fielding some sheep with their cyclopes shepherds:
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Apr 30, 2024 14:27
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While I could never get into Dominions as a game, the concepts and lore included in the game is amazing. Sheep Mages are something you'd basically never find anywhere else, and that's a crime.
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May 1, 2024 02:53
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Numbus26 posted:While I could never get into Dominions as a game, the concepts and lore included in the game is amazing. Sheep Mages are something you'd basically never find anywhere else, and that's a crime. This is a result of the cowardice and weakness of modern people refusing to take seriously how seriously people took things like sheep. They hear "Iphiclus, rich in sheep," and think it comical. But Iphiclus is not comical. Nor is Jesus' role as shepherd, nor Hermes' role as god of shepherds, supposed to be seen as silly or funny. Sheep are serious business, they are the cornerstone of the economy of the world's largest land empire ever. Dominions is, for all its goofiness, a game that comes out of a real sincere desire to take magical history and history of magic very seriously. Anyway, I have played some Dominions and I know that I'd have to completely reformat everything about my life and personality to actually enjoy playing it, so I'm INCREDIBLY grateful for each and every SSLP.
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May 1, 2024 04:13
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Tulip posted:This is a result of the cowardice and weakness of modern people refusing to take seriously how seriously people took things like sheep. They hear "Iphiclus, rich in sheep," and think it comical. But Iphiclus is not comical. Nor is Jesus' role as shepherd, nor Hermes' role as god of shepherds, supposed to be seen as silly or funny. Sheep are serious business, they are the cornerstone of the economy of the world's largest land empire ever. a Good Post
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May 1, 2024 04:15
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Totally - as absurd as the situations wind up being, almost all of the nations are based on historical analogues and the myths and traditions they're built from are treated with a lot of respect and care. I can't think of any lazy stereotypes or stock fantasy tropes in the design of any of the nations. With just over 100 nations in the game (granted, many are iterations or evolutions through the ages), it's a really impressive volume of research and mythology all packed into an absolutely ridiculous game. Some of the independents are less interesting - trolls are pretty much just trolls - but even then they have some fun with it. Probably my favorite random event message is simply: "Trolls!" and then a bunch of independent trolls attack one of your provinces. It's goofy but fun - I'll keep an eye out for some of the other more entertaining messages to highlight.
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May 1, 2024 04:38
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One of my favorite things about these games is actually how the nations evolve and change from age to age. Some of them take really interesting twists or totally double down on some weird minor thing in a previous age. The transition from high magic to low magic is also fascinating. It's very cool to see Nation A turn into Nation C over time.
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May 1, 2024 05:06
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Tulip posted:This is a result of the cowardice and weakness of modern people refusing to take seriously how seriously people took things like sheep. They hear "Iphiclus, rich in sheep," and think it comical. But Iphiclus is not comical. Nor is Jesus' role as shepherd, nor Hermes' role as god of shepherds, supposed to be seen as silly or funny. Sheep are serious business, they are the cornerstone of the economy of the world's largest land empire ever. I'm aware of the importance of herding and all that. I'm sorry if my post came off as mocking the setting, I just genuinely enjoy seeing deeper takes on magic and faith and how they interact with a world to produce unique history. I thought it was very cool and unique since you don't normally see people thinking about smaller things like this in favor of more generic wizard towers and whatnot. Again, my apologies.
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May 1, 2024 05:09
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Phrosphor posted:One of my favorite things about these games is actually how the nations evolve and change from age to age. Some of them take really interesting twists or totally double down on some weird minor thing in a previous age. The transition from high magic to low magic is also fascinating. It's very cool to see Nation A turn into Nation C over time. I love the Ermor spinoff nations and just how Ermor in general changes stuff around it. The change from Marignon being crazy inquisitors out to crush the scourge of the undead to this decadent court of demon obsessed conquistadors is insane but makes complete sense when looked at and is so much fun.
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May 1, 2024 06:16
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This also extends to Conquest of Elysium, and some of my favorite unit text comes from there. In particular, wild bears aren't actually carnivores, and only wander into human settlements to go after potatoes. Deer, on the other hand, are bloodthirsty monsters.
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May 1, 2024 07:19
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Gort fucked around with this message at 13:34 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 12:07
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No but they definitely did in Old Great Srpska.
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May 1, 2024 12:39
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gently caress off with that poo poo.
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May 1, 2024 12:40
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? Edit: Christ, I'd only seen the one picture (of a map) and had assumed it had come from some crazy Korean nationalist. Leave it to 4chan to ruin everything. Gort fucked around with this message at 13:35 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 13:29
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Turn 16 Nothing too exciting this turn - we can immediately see that all five of our captains failed to find any magic sites, which is pretty unlucky. Magic sites have different requirements to find, depending on their rarity, but generally speaking 2 in a path is enough to find about 90% of all possible options. So, there could still be a high level air site in one of these provinces, but it's pretty unlikely. We're also informed that we can declare a new prophet now that it's been long enough since our previous one was murdered by the sea elves. We're going to declare one of our scouts - a stealthy prophet can be quite nice, since they spread dominion naturally and high movement. We'll name him "Richy Rich", keeping on with the money theme. Speaking of money, we're now up to 4 palisades going up in various stages of completion. This is a a bit risky since we have a fairly small standing army, but once they finish we'll really be able to start ramping up our mage production and our neighbors seem friendly enough for now. We also get an... interesting random event. "Virgins" in this case refers to blood slaves. Blood slaves power blood magic, which works a bit differently than all the other schools. While there are a few blood sites (and in fact we found one already that gives us +3 slaves/turn), blood slaves are generally acquired by sending out blood mages to search up some virgins from your provinces who are then sacrificed to power blood magic. I'm, uh, not sure exactly how this is going to absolve you, but you do you buddy. We're not going to be a serious blood power in this game - while it's technically possible for any nation to break into blood, it's rarely worth it if you don't have recruitable mages with blood paths. Still, a low inflow of blood slaves is a useful thing to have to grab a few key items later. Moving on, let's see how our mercs are getting on. They're definitely a little thinned out from their early fight... let's see what they're up against today. ... oh. That's a LOT of barbarians. There's also a few other friends lurking in the back Sprites can be a big annoyance - they don't do any damage, but they have a long range attack that will instantly set a unit's fatigue to 100. In addition to preventing a unit from doing anything until their fatigue drops below 100, high fatigue also has attack and defense penalties. This is really not what you want when an angry barbarian is in your face and swinging a maul at said face. The other units are these guys - three enchanters. Indie throne defender mages almost always come with gems, which can potentially make them fairly dangerous since spells that need gems tend to be quite strong. A 2N, 1G mage isn't super intimidating, but they can summon a large swarm of bugs (normal sized, but more dangerous than it sounds) or just spam some tree animations, which can also be deadly. We can also see that this one happens to be carrying a magic item that gives him a bonus 2 nature gems for fights. These "temp gem gen" items can be pretty useful since otherwise mages can only restock on gems from laboratories. There's a chance that we'll pick up the item if we win the fight, which would be a nice little bonus. We don't currently have any N mages, but we will at some point. Our doomed mercs charge forward and you can see the volume of elf shots being fired - these will really break up the lines of a squad more organized than these foul spawn. The lines close and half our mercs instantly disappear in cloud of red numbers. Um, yea - you served us well you gross crossbreeding experiments, may you rest in peace. The summary shows what we already know - 200 barbarians is quite the crowd. It's not insurmountable for us since our troops are pretty good compared to most humans, but we'll still want to spend a few turns gathering most of our forces together to take this on. One final event is a worldwide one - there's a deathmatch scheduled! The deathmatch allows each nation to send a single contender to a series of single elimination battles, and the victor receives some gold, a magic item, and a pile of fire gems. The fire gems in particular would be nice for us, we only have a single gem coming in per turn and we'll want some later on for a pretty good summon. We're going to send in our Lochos. We don't have any gear to give him so he's just going as he is. I don't really expect him to win - he's fairly tough but doesn't have any tricks other than "hit thing hard". His weapon is magic, which might help? We rename him "Wait... This isn't Phaeacia" for a funny little gag, and send him off to glory and/or death. Movement this turn is just getting our troops shuffled over to take on the throne - it's going to be another turn before we're in place. Otherwise, we're getting some priests moved up around Phlegra's cap to start wearing down the dominion and getting more builders in place to keep expanding our coastal fortifications. DarthRoblox fucked around with this message at 14:52 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 14:48
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Does independent province defence strength indicate a particularly juicy province or is it basically random?
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May 1, 2024 15:02
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Alchenar posted:Does independent province defence strength indicate a particularly juicy province or is it basically random? Basically random - it typically tells you what kind of units you can recruit from that province, but that's about it. Throne can often have thematic defenders - ie, the Throne of Death will typically have a big pile of undead and a big necromancer, but other thrones will just have larger-than-usual but otherwise normal indies. There's also a handful of "special" sets of defenders that generally indicate a specific site exists in the province but we don't run into any of those this game; there's typically maybe a few like that our of the hundreds of provinces in the game.
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May 1, 2024 15:12
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Alchenar posted:Does independent province defence strength indicate a particularly juicy province or is it basically random? DarthRoblox posted:Basically random - it typically tells you what kind of units you can recruit from that province, but that's about it. Not quite, number of indie defenders outside of thrones almost always scales related to population, and high population, while not revealing sites and gem-richness, means more gold income and recruitment points. Which makes them an interesting early decision during expansion: do you risk the high level of defenders to cinch the good province, or risk someone else getting it first? Sometimes a viable strategy is to "encircle" a number of good provinces you want by going for weakly defended provinces and hoping no one wants the 15k pop province badly enough to start a year 1 hellwar over it. DarthRoblox posted:One final event is a worldwide one - there's a deathmatch scheduled! The deathmatch allows each nation to send a single contender to a series of single elimination battles, and the victor receives some gold, a magic item, and a pile of fire gems. The fire gems in particular would be nice for us, we only have a single gem coming in per turn and we'll want some later on for a pretty good summon. The death matches have been changed up some since Dominions 5, where they only yielded the item and were generally a waste of your time unless you could get a powerful assassin type commander in there to snag it. Buffing the prizes is a sorely lacking point, in my opinion. However, not sending anyone to the Deathmatch is a sign of cowardice, so you should always at least have a scout ready to send off. It's just tradition. Plus if no one sends anyone it disappoints the entire world who had been hoping for the PPV event and drops dominion candles globally.
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May 1, 2024 15:46
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PurpleXVI posted:Not quite, number of indie defenders outside of thrones almost always scales related to population, and high population, while not revealing sites and gem-richness, means more gold income and recruitment points. Which makes them an interesting early decision during expansion: do you risk the high level of defenders to cinch the good province, or risk someone else getting it first? Sometimes a viable strategy is to "encircle" a number of good provinces you want by going for weakly defended provinces and hoping no one wants the 15k pop province badly enough to start a year 1 hellwar over it. Fair points - knowing whether a province is going to generate a bunch of cash is really valuable, especially early on when you're scraping together pennies to get your first few forts off the ground. Since research compounds with time, getting early forts ASAP is almost always a priority for me, and you can't do that if you don't have any cash. And yea - even if you send some garbage nobody there's still a chance they could win, especially since the victor of each round doesn't heal in between fights. You can wind up in a situation where your plucky little scout only needs to land a single hit on the decked out terror of the seas to claim victory. Of course, it's more likely that they simply get wrecked by an actual contender, but you gotta do it for the fans.
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May 1, 2024 16:32
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DarthRoblox posted:Fair points - knowing whether a province is going to generate a bunch of cash is really valuable, especially early on when you're scraping together pennies to get your first few forts off the ground. Since research compounds with time, getting early forts ASAP is almost always a priority for me, and you can't do that if you don't have any cash. Also summary execution for Mages that had the gall to become old and feeble minded. "On the left side, 'I can't sneak past the guards!" Prophet of the pretender 'Clapping Cheeks!'. On the right hand side, a feebleminded mage who got the 1/64th random needed to break into nature, 'What an rear end in a top hat'!"
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May 1, 2024 16:45
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Numbus26 posted:I'm aware of the importance of herding and all that. I'm sorry if my post came off as mocking the setting, I just genuinely enjoy seeing deeper takes on magic and faith and how they interact with a world to produce unique history. I thought it was very cool and unique since you don't normally see people thinking about smaller things like this in favor of more generic wizard towers and whatnot. Again, my apologies. Nothing to apologize for! I was absolutely not calling you a coward or a fool, any negative feelings there were directed very much not at you but past you, toward the fantasy authors who never really thought through "magic that flows from people's lives."
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May 2, 2024 06:10
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