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If there's one thing you can count on the AI to do it is to never leverage any type of research in any meaningful way. The most you'll see an AI army do is send a couple of mages with an army that cast random, useless spells, or outfit random commanders with equally random items like lightless lanterns and bane blades.
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Sep 23, 2013 23:39
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I've seen the AI field respectable supercombatant pretenders on occasion. But even then, they'll never react to the counters you can develop. I took out a Wyrm with thousands of hit points just by summoning a few turns worth of ghosts and fatiguing it out with chill auras. Lemuria should have a major advantage over the typical AI hordes, since they'll be starving by the time they start rampaging near your national core. You might want to try kitting out bane lords or something as thugs if your ghost hordes find something they are too fragile to handle. Or get one of the Protection buff spells. Do you have access to any earth or nature magic? -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Does anyone have tips for playing T'ien Ch'i in MA? You have some interesting new pretenders, it looks like, and the capital mages have changed. Disease Healer on the Imperial Alchemist means old age is slightly less of a problem, perhaps.
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Sep 24, 2013 04:08
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Mass archers.
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Sep 24, 2013 04:11
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Order is way too good now, everyone takes it. They need to spice it up a bit.
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Sep 24, 2013 04:15
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WYA posted:Order is way too good now, everyone takes it. They need to spice it up a bit. "Now"? I'm pretty sure people only touched negative order in mod games.
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Sep 24, 2013 04:18
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Tulip posted:"Now"? I'm pretty sure people only touched negative order in mod games. Turmoil 3/Luck 3 for life!
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Sep 24, 2013 04:32
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EA Arco, Sloth 3, Turmoil 3, Luck 3 all the way, baby!
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Sep 24, 2013 04:58
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quote:Does anyone have tips for playing T'ien Ch'i in MA? You have some interesting new pretenders, it looks like, and the capital mages have changed. Disease Healer on the Imperial Alchemist means old age is slightly less of a problem, perhaps. There are a few things you might want to get on a MA TC god, and their attendant strategies. - High level astral magic. You can't use a skullcap + crystal coin (made with earth boots) on a S3 to climb up to the Rings of Sorcery and Wizardry anymore, and even if you could getting that S3 in the first place is low odds. While you search well for astral a lot of Astral's power requires high levels especially for ritual use. Getting access to the rings gives you a lategame almost by itself because it means suddenly it's easy to get all your other paths (especially Air and Fire and to a lesser extent nature) to high levels for your cap-only mages without empowering. This is much more expensive to do now but if there's any nation at all that justifies getting some astral to do it it is probably TC. You probably want S5-S6 depending, more if your god doesn't have a head slot or two misc slots. - Death access. With the number of summonable Death Mages from having death at all, you can get a sideline in death that can be helpful for lategame thug equipment, for ritual access, for tarts, etc. etc if you take it on your god. -Consider ~level 4 in Air, Fire, or other stuff. Getting booster access easily and early without forging/using rings is nice. - Good scales. You get a high resource cost but really good and versatile army as TC natively. You probably don't need a supercombatant to expand. If it's a tiny cramped map and a rush game, consider a SC god anyways. Otherwise, rejoice that you have so many types of dudes with long reach weapons who repel stuff a lot now and as a consequence are much more effective. Seriously glaives and pikemen do a lot better in melee now against lower length stuff. You also have some of the best archers in the game, and access to enough Fire for Flame Arrows and Air for Wind Guide - basically turning every Archer with a composite bow from a good unit to an amazing unit. As an expansion strategy, consider armies with a bunch of Archers, a small group of shielded, heavily protected arrow catchers, and a group of guys with pikes or spears/shields/armor depending on your resources. Early on, get guys sitesearching by walking around. Early gems can be converted directly into expansion with new summoning spells, some of which are probably overpowered (see: Ogres). Try to get forts and recruit the guys who don't need labs to be bought but give like 11 research. As a pretender, I would be torn between a dormant rainbow to get into death and astral and air and fire with medium-good scales, a imprisoned immobile with high astral and insane scales, and one of the titans awake with starting astral raised to decently high levels. The Boddhivasta (sp?) looks like it might be a good way to get astral 5-6 and air 4 cheaplu on a SC, which you can boost higher(skullcap/coin) and use to forge the Air Boosters, as well as being a decent SC. I have heard that all the 50 point chasses are temporary costs that will be replaced (read:increased) in the final version, so that advice will probably soon become outdated soon. Scales: Growth helps prevents old age afflictions so is probably a good idea. Disease is less of a problem but mute etc still suck. Order is very strong, and misfortune seems a small disadvantage at present. Production is very useful. Temperature scales are probably not a necessary source of points but a point can make a huge difference in making maps more/less open with the new 'frozen winter'/'melted mountain pass' mechanic. More than that is probably inadvisable as TC likes to move around huge armies who eat a lot. If the other players are better at raiding etc than you, you may want to choose to get a point or two in whatever scales will make it harder to move around in the map as a whole. Hugely map dependent, but some seem to have a lot of mountain passes and not many rivers to freeze or vice versa. Of course if everyone else is a cold nation or whatever taking heat can be good just to make it more annoying to invade you. Great Gray Shrike fucked around with this message at 05:03 on Sep 24, 2013 |
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Sep 24, 2013 05:01
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Tulip posted:"Now"? I'm pretty sure people only touched negative order in mod games. Turmoil3/Luck3 had a place in Dom3, especially if you had positive prod and/or growth scales to help with raising your base income back up. Order is way more important in 4, though.
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Sep 24, 2013 06:55
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Kenlon posted:Turmoil3/Luck3 had a place in Dom3, especially if you had positive prod and/or growth scales to help with raising your base income back up. Order is way more important in 4, though. What changed, exactly?
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Sep 24, 2013 07:02
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:What changed, exactly? Unrest is much, much worse now, and order helps with that.
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Sep 24, 2013 07:05
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And you get far less gold from events.
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Sep 24, 2013 07:10
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I'd disagree that TC has a particularly high res army. Its archers are slightly annoyingly expensive in terms of resources, but even they should be manageable, and its mapmove 2 infantry is all 15r or below (typically about 10r). You can go a point of Sloth to make sure you have a decent God. You'll want Magic, because your non-cap research is nothing special. Growth is a very good income scale now. Does it actually affect the rate of afflictions? Dunno. Says it does, but then there is a lot of bullshit in Dominions. You want the Supply, in any case. On a small map where you want to be able to keep up the aggression, take a point of cold. On a big map, where you don't want to worry about every crossing, take a point of heat. You have a 25% W3 caster in your Celestial Masters, so you can probably Wolven Winter yourself across a river if need be. Incidentally, Ministers of Magic do now require a lab in a fort to be able to be built. In a non-Blitz game I'd go something like a Dormant Dom 6 Jade Emperor, A4W3S6D4, O3S1H1G1M1M1. In a Blitz game, maybe an Awake Dom 9 Nataraja, F3A2E4S4, O3P0C3G1L1D3. The Astral's a bit low against certain nations like Bandar Log and Abysia, perhaps, but the important self-buffs are there. Tuxedo Catfish posted:What changed, exactly? T3L3 seems to be less appealing because: - Unrest is 'worse' (questionable - unrest is harder to deal with, but provinces still produce quite a lot of resources at high unrest, even if they can't use them themselves if it gets over 100). - L3 seems to do less (but then so few people pick T3L3 that it's hard to get decent numbers). - It gives certain nations nobody will pick again in a hurry an advantage, notably Yomi, who are pretty terrible, and Lanka, who've taken a hit from the nerf bat that is probably going to be changed when Chaos Power is made less bad. - Allegedly longer use of big national armies means more upkeep. - O3M3 is the new old meta (whether people going O3M3 are changing back to Common events from the default of Rare, dunno). jBrereton fucked around with this message at 07:35 on Sep 24, 2013 |
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Sep 24, 2013 07:20
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e: not Desura, again.
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Sep 24, 2013 07:33
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avoraciopoctules posted:I've seen the AI field respectable supercombatant pretenders on occasion. But even then, they'll never react to the counters you can develop. I took out a Wyrm with thousands of hit points just by summoning a few turns worth of ghosts and fatiguing it out with chill auras. My pretender has earth 3 besides her death 10, so I get access as soon as she breaks free from imprisonment. Until then I use my national commanders (tons of shadow tribunes and the like) to buff my ghost hordes: A few of their priest spells protect my army quite well from enemy priests. One time a much smaller ghost army even overran an indep army with mages and priests. (The one AI I've found hasn't attacked me yet.) Most of my mages are still chained to my capital to get me research, so I have to do without magic for a while. If I'm lucky, I can start summoning wights and banes in about a year, bane lords are still a bit out of my league, though. 
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Sep 24, 2013 09:04
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Libluini posted:My pretender has earth 3 besides her death 10, so I get access as soon as she breaks free from imprisonment. Until then I use my national commanders (tons of shadow tribunes and the like) to buff my ghost hordes: A few of their priest spells protect my army quite well from enemy priests. One time a much smaller ghost army even overran an indep army with mages and priests. (The one AI I've found hasn't attacked me yet.) Most of my mages are still chained to my capital to get me research, so I have to do without magic for a while. Lemuria has a fair few Sacred units, and even though you're not going to rack up fatigue just by fighting as undead, it helps their mages a bit.
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Sep 24, 2013 10:09
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jBrereton posted:Any reason you went E3D10 over E4/5D9? I wanted to push the "Death!"-theme to its limits, so I went with a pretender with something like W2E3D10 plus full death/ice scales and 10 dominion. E3 is the odd thing out, I took it just in case I wanted to forge something which needs earth. In hindsight, not my smartest decision. Also, it forced me to take two scales in drain and turmoil to compensate for the E3-option. If I could redo this, I would go full icy death, losing the scales in drain and turmoil, losing the earth magic and take another w instead, to get something like W3D10, 3/3 death/cold and 10 dominion. And all this just to see what "death weapons" can do! Edit: Ugh. Well, now I know not to use a death weapons bless. At least in multiplayer games, in my test game I still fully intend to wallop the AI with it and look what I can get out of it. vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv Libluini fucked around with this message at 11:52 on Sep 24, 2013 |
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Sep 24, 2013 10:47
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Death weapons are pretty bad. 2 armor negating damage that only works on living beings and rolls against magic resistance to happen in the first place.
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Sep 24, 2013 11:24
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dis astranagant posted:Death weapons are pretty bad. 2 armor negating damage that only works on living beings and rolls against magic resistance to happen in the first place. If we ever get a Dom 4 CBM, I think my main desire for MA Ulm would be a nation-specific dome. "Zone of gently caress Off, Magic" or whatever. Because as it stands, they are just waiting to get shat on by Rain of Toads/Baleful Star/Blight/Etc., and they have nothing they can do about it outside of a pretender chassis like the Allfather bringing a bunch of A and S to the table, or an F2 Master Priest with a couple of ritual levels to cast Dome of Flaming Death (when their slow-rear end research gets there, and assuming they scrape together the gems).
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Sep 24, 2013 11:56
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How do you hire providence guards in Dominion 3?
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Sep 24, 2013 12:43
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DrManiac posted:How do you hire providence guards in Dominion 3?
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Sep 24, 2013 12:55
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I'm trying to learn Mictlan, but I have to assume all of the guides out there might be outdated. From what I understand, in Dom 3 a decent approach would have been to get good bless, good dominion, poor scale; buy Jaguar Warriors and national priests; place forts rather quickly; eventually start trading income for blood; jade knives, brazen vessels, Ozelotls, etc. Is that still basically how they work? I've tried out the early game against the AI several times, and most of that still seems to apply but poor scale early forts make it hard to expand and defend. I always end up with very little land/income.
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Sep 24, 2013 12:58
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wshngmchn posted:I'm trying to learn Mictlan, but I have to assume all of the guides out there might be outdated. I havent had a chance to try them out but i think the only real difference is now instead of trading income for blood slaves you trade patrol time, but with mictlans ability to levy slave warriors you could probably get a decent patrol force up for free.
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Sep 24, 2013 13:01
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wshngmchn posted:I'm trying to learn Mictlan, but I have to assume all of the guides out there might be outdated. You can generally get decent scales while still having an okay-to-good bless. Something like a single major (F9 or W9) is very easy to play, while still making your jaguars effective. This leaves you with enough points to purchase a nice set of scales, especially if your pretender is imprisoned. Then you can leverage your decent income with your still effective sacreds to crush all your enemies. Also all that other stuff isn't dependent on your scales, but is still important to do; so do those things too.
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Sep 24, 2013 13:14
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wshngmchn posted:I'm trying to learn Mictlan, but I have to assume all of the guides out there might be outdated. It works very similarly with a few caveats. Your blood income is going to be much less now as 2 B1+SDR hunters per province brings in the best slave income with about 100-140ish unrest. More hunters doesn't help as it will drive unrest to extreme heights and stop slave hunts completely. If you go growth you could add more and patrol unrest down but it's going to depopulate anything but the largest of provinces. As such, you can't go completely to demon swarms and will have to rely heavily on Jags the whole game. A dual 9 bless imprisoned pretender (F9+something else generally) with O3 for unrest reduction works very well. Trashing your scales and going T3 with an extreme bless is a bad idea. Blood income is lower and heavily dependent on unrest. The difference between O3 and T3 is 6 unrest a turn on top of the normal income loss. F9B9 seems to be a really good option, as one of the main weaknesses of Jags are massed combat mages and B9 fucks them over rather nicely. Massed archers are the other but there are better and far cheaper ways to kill those than throwing your 25g sacreds into a meatgrinder (Pile of warriors w/ Flaming arrows, flyers set to attack archers etc.) Nuclearmonkee fucked around with this message at 13:47 on Sep 24, 2013 |
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Sep 24, 2013 13:44
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Lilli posted:You can generally get decent scales while still having an okay-to-good bless. Something like a single major (F9 or W9) is very easy to play, while still making your jaguars effective. This leaves you with enough points to purchase a nice set of scales, especially if your pretender is imprisoned. Then you can leverage your decent income with your still effective sacreds to crush all your enemies. Also all that other stuff isn't dependent on your scales, but is still important to do; so do those things too. Nuclearmonkee posted:It works very similarly with a few caveats. Your blood income is going to be much less now as 2 B1+SDR hunters per province brings in the best slave income with about 100-140ish unrest. More hunters doesn't help as it will drive unrest to extreme heights and stop slave hunts completely. If you go growth you could add more and patrol unrest down but it's going to depopulate anything but the largest of provinces. As such, you can't go completely to demon swarms and will have to rely heavily on Jags the whole game. A dual 9 bless imprisoned pretender (F9+something else generally) with O3 for unrest reduction works very well. Trashing your scales and going T3 with an extreme bless is a bad idea. Blood income is lower and heavily dependent on unrest. The difference between O3 and T3 is 6 unrest a turn on top of the normal income loss. Thanks for the advice. I've been mostly going for something like this: Smoking Mirror, dormant F9B9 7 dominion T2, S3, H3, D2, L1, M1 It sounds like I need to trade something for order/growth. My first choice would be to shave a few points off of blood, maybe F9B5 so I can still get Rain of Jaguars. That would give me enough for Order 1 and Death 0. Seems like my only other option is imprisoning. I don't think I should let dominion get any lower, and I'm partial to a little bit of luck in most games. I also like the W9BX Teotl of Rain, which frees up enough for another point of dominion and another point of order. LordLeckie posted:I havent had a chance to try them out but i think the only real difference is now instead of trading income for blood slaves you trade patrol time, but with mictlans ability to levy slave warriors you could probably get a decent patrol force up for free. I forgot they could even do that. I've never used that ability. That's something to look into.
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Sep 24, 2013 14:31
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wshngmchn posted:Thanks for the advice. I've been mostly going for something like this: Imprisoning and switching to fountain of blood will give you a lot of points to play with. Note that M1 isn't nearly as important anymore with the new research levels. I made up for it by spamming the gently caress out of the new blood research aid and lightless lanterns.
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Sep 24, 2013 14:53
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The change to the B9 bless means that if you want to use Eagle Warriors or Jags, you're basically going to have to use them on their own (because big evo and ranged weapons usage is going to loving obliterate your supporting 'artillery' with BV). Luckily, Jags and EWs are incredibly low-resource units, so you've got 120 points free if that's your tack. On the bad side, with how difficult it is to crack the first enemy fort now, rushing your enemy with a few dozen Jaguars means they've probably got about a year to call other players up to come and take you out. If they can summon animals, expect an incredibly drawn-out siege. In EA, you start with a Palisade that has incredibly low defence (and administration), so you really have to keep an eye out for people encroaching on your land. LA, you start with a decent Castle, so it's not quite as much of a problem, but then you're also surrounded by nations with even stronger forts.
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Sep 24, 2013 15:17
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Turmoil/Luck in Dom3 was a gimmick strategy that was either for double 9 or better blesses, or specific to a few nations, or played by people who chose to run non-optimally. It's the same in Dom4, except events are much worse; you will get a lot less gold and fewer gems. That said if you want double 9 or better blesses it's still pretty much necessary. You still run Mictlan basically the same as Dom3. Blood 9 or Death 9 are now viable blesses alongside W9, F9, and S9. Forts take longer to build, blood is less plentiful, but generally speaking it's the same old Mictlan. The unrest reduction from Order is only really a big deal for blood nations, because every nation gets % unrest reduction by default and PD unrest reduction and can patrol. For blood nations, it means your blood hunting provinces will be operating at a lower unrest = either more hunters or higher income. Related, for blood hunting the "default" is to use a small number of hunters which will stabilize at a certain level of unrest; two B2 or two B1+sdr normally, or with O3 and PD you can hover around 0 unrest with one B1 no sdr. You can try patrolling but that will annihilate your population quite quickly; that is to say, there's only a small popkill in the blood formula and no popkill just for having unrest, but a large popkill for patrolling. You basically need Growth 3 to make patrol blood hunting viable, and even then it hurts and since blood hunting unrest is applied sequentially it doesn't actually benefit you that much.
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Sep 24, 2013 15:34
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jBrereton posted:The change to the B9 bless means that if you want to use Eagle Warriors or Jags, you're basically going to have to use them on their own (because big evo and ranged weapons usage is going to loving obliterate your supporting 'artillery' with BV). Luckily, Jags and EWs are incredibly low-resource units, so you've got 120 points free if that's your tack. If you setup your squads well the collateral from slingers isn't going to be that high, and who cares about a few warriors anyways. You do have to make drat sure you lay off the evos though. Once the melee is joined you can't afford to go blowing all of your mages up.
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Sep 24, 2013 15:40
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What do you guys think of Imp Familiars? They're 10 blood slave research boosters with a bonus of 3.
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Sep 24, 2013 16:18
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amuayse posted:What do you guys think of Imp Familiars? They're 10 blood slave research boosters with a bonus of 3. Aren't they just 5 slaves? I remember pumping them out with B1 Mictlan Priests.
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Sep 24, 2013 16:22
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Oh yeah, 5 my mistake. Sanguine Dousing Rod is 5 too. I've been playing LA Marignon, and those Fallen Angels with Invulnerable 25 are pretty crazy.
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Sep 24, 2013 16:32
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amuayse posted:What do you guys think of Imp Familiars? They're 5 blood slave research boosters with a bonus of 3.
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Sep 24, 2013 16:51
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^^^^ Lots of great tips for Mictlan. Lots to experiment with. Thanks everyone.
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Sep 24, 2013 17:14
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How can I play Caelum without getting completely exploded? I like to run them with Virtue, but I feel like winning a big battle is a crap shoot if I get forced into that situation.
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Sep 24, 2013 17:18
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Thunder Strike. Disrupt with stormfliers like Air Elementals or Spring Hawks or Yazads/yazata/whateverthey'recalled. If you are using storm then send in the troops once the enemy is disrupted. If you are not, you want lots and lots of your archers with minimal blockers.
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Sep 24, 2013 17:35
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Pomp posted:How can I play Caelum without getting completely exploded? I like to run them with Virtue, but I feel like winning a big battle is a crap shoot if I get forced into that situation. For EA, don't get lots of Eagle Kings. Recruit primarily Spire Horn archers and mammoths and you can mow through most indies. Have at least 2 mammoths per army. Make sure you put your mammoths off to the side. Have a few spearmen to make sure you aren't completely defenseless if you get bum rushed. Later in the game when it's always stormy, try bring some Tempest Warriors since they can fly in storms. I'd only recommend Yazads if you have a major bless. Iceclad are good, but they're only move 2. Research primarily Evocation with some Conjurgation and Construction. Getting Evocation to 5 is really important because Storm will become your bread and butter in the later mid game and late game. Orb Lightning and Thunderstrike will be your go to spells at first. Wrathful Skies with Storm kills everything on the battlefield that doesn't have shock resistance, so it goes well with your Tempest Warriors. Shimmering Fields is your final super battle spell but that's all the way at level 9. Now Alteration or Construction are good schools to go off to since there's good stuff in both. Construction has the boosters like Bag of Winds, Winged Helmet, and Staff of Storms. Alteration lets you summons tons of illusions, and will absolutely wreck any army without MR. Fog Warriors at Alt 7 gives your entire army Mistform, so that's devastating as well. If you're really ballsy, you can bring up globals like Perpetual Storm which makes every province stormy. Fata Morgana also gives you illusion PD and boosts your income and production. If for some reason you have a Harab and an unused Staff of Storms (unlikely), you can spam Corpse Construct. Basically meaty and shock/cold resistant undead. Not sure how useful they would be though.
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Sep 24, 2013 18:19
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amuayse posted:For EA, don't get lots of Eagle Kings. Recruit primarily Spire Horn archers and mammoths and you can mow through most indies. Have at least 2 mammoths per army. Make sure you put your mammoths off to the side. Have a few spearmen to make sure you aren't completely defenseless if you get bum rushed. Later in the game when it's always stormy, try bring some Tempest Warriors since they can fly in storms. I'd only recommend Yazads if you have a major bless. Iceclad are good, but they're only move 2. Speaking of mammoths (and any elephants really) it is absolutely critical that you get rid of the worthless limping/crippled ones ASAP. If healing isn't available, I like splitting them off and suiciding them into a nasty indie province or forewarned neighbor. They are expensive with high maintenance and it's no good having a bunch of slow ones that are largely useless in combat eating into your budget.
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Sep 24, 2013 18:24
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Oh yeah, and Elephants are useless outside of attacking squishy indies.
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Sep 24, 2013 18:45
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