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There was a bug that prevented some armloss afflictions from being healed. Should be fixed - patch your game or contact Illwinter.
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Nov 6, 2013 20:28
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How are u posted:Agartha has such cool backstory what with all of that guarding the Seal in the deepest, darkest cave at the bottom of the world. With the Seal breaking who knows what kind of cool poo poo you could add to the nation. Hopefully its Lovecraftian as poo poo because I always got that vibe from them. Agartha's flavor is more H. Rider Haggard than Lovecraft, as it should be seeing as we already have a Lovecraft nation. So less unknowable alien horrors, more subtly corrupting ancient demigods.
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Nov 6, 2013 20:31
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In unmodded Dom3 EA Agartha you kind of struggled through until you hit two power spikes: Earth battlemagic at conj 3 plus one of alt 4 or evo 4, and Darkness and the ability to cast it (pretender & pretender forging) at Alt 6 and possibly Const 6. There were two big issues, your mage density was entirely cap mages since Earth Readers are useless out of the lab, and just as importantly you absolutely needed a mountain of death gems. And even if you hit everything you needed the nation is average at best. Mods did make them much better but mods also did all kinds of stupid bullshit. In Dom4 your cap mage density is cut in half, and the Earth Reader is just as useless. The lack of patrol-tax in the first turns means you delay Oracle recruitment a few extra turns too, further reducing your mage #s. Your troops are the same, that is to say you struggle to your research goals, but the N4 regen bless for expansion that you could kind of use on Ancient Ones in Dom3 is no longer. In addition Darkness is nerfed a bit (lower penalty), the second D booster needs D5 and I think it costs more, and the research cost to get what you need takes longer. Depending what we get, the mage issue could easily be fixed in this patch, I've heard mention that we might get something.
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Nov 6, 2013 23:18
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Here's a list of the commanders that are both StR and Cap-Only. http://www.desura.com/games/dominions-4-thrones-of-ascensions/forum/thread/str-and-cap-only-commanders amuayse fucked around with this message at 07:20 on Nov 7, 2013 |
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Nov 7, 2013 07:16
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"Agartha is perhaps the most tragic of the nations in Dominions. Surviving oracles cling to memories of a glorious past unable to stop the unavoidable disappearance of their ancient race. I wanted a sense of loss to permeate the nation." I haven't played much of this game, but it seems to be more about narrative than balance. I think they're fine.
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Nov 7, 2013 09:16
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wshngmchn posted:"Agartha is perhaps the most tragic of the nations in Dominions. Surviving oracles cling to memories of a glorious past unable to stop the unavoidable disappearance of their ancient race. I wanted a sense of loss to permeate the nation." The narrative of Agartha is fine. Them being dramatically weaker then most other nations is not. The level of imbalance here and how useless a lot of things are are not good game design. Roland Jones fucked around with this message at 09:30 on Nov 7, 2013 |
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Nov 7, 2013 09:27
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wshngmchn posted:"Agartha is perhaps the most tragic of the nations in Dominions. Surviving oracles cling to memories of a glorious past unable to stop the unavoidable disappearance of their ancient race. I wanted a sense of loss to permeate the nation." EA Agartha also has one of the most overpriced recruit-everywhere mages in the game, because the chance of E2 brings a big cost increase. They only have Prec 7, so they're no good at battlemagic, and cost 145g for 9rp. The StR, cap-only Oracles aren't very good in their non-Earth Paths, and can very easily be old. Since their troops are bad, showering them in Alteration spells with all that Earth magic isn't that appealing. They don't have the paths for native Gifts from Heaven or Rain of Stones, either. Horrid! MA Agartha is a lineup of uninteresting-to-terrible melee troops, plus some hard-to-obtain additional guys (also melee troops). Overall, underpowered and boring to play. These things are supposed to be addressed in a patch which is coming out shortly. We'll see what happens! LA Agartha is just a low-to-mid-tier nation, but that's relatively fine. Their troops are basically OK, and their StR mage has good buff paths. Their recruitable sacreds being Enc 10, magic beings, and movement 5 is slightly bleh, mind (it also makes them just about the only mobile, non-flying unit for whom being Crippled is nominally less of a movement penalty than getting a limp, along with Entrance Guards). The one advantage all ages of Agartha have is that they are quite likely to be located in Cave provinces, which are often near other Caves. These provinces have the most predictable and predictably bad indies inside, are a treasure trove of resources, and with Darkvision 50, you're only taking -1 to att/def/precision on your human troops because of how it gets rounded.
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Nov 7, 2013 13:27
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Nation balance is a problem but eh underpowered is better than way overpowered. Right now it seems pretender balance is all out to lunch. You can have a d9 awake prince of death without trash scales. The Bodhisattva of Mercy is a beast and other things that I am too bad to discover. It seems like it should be a high priority because those wreck more games than weak nations do. I think the pretender issue is worse now because it takes longer to get to super combatant counters. The game is still young so,jBrereton posted:
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Nov 7, 2013 15:21
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folytopo posted:The Bodhisattva of Mercy is a beast How so? It looked fairly average to me.
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Nov 7, 2013 16:01
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Lemme take a newbie whack at the Bodhisitivatavitsa of Mercy: She costs 100 build points and another 70 per additional path, so taking her as an awake SC is going to mean lovely scales/low paths and taking Dom 9 or 10 to increase her innate Awe5 isn't going to be an option. She has a meager 33 HP, 0 Prot and 12 Def, so it's more likely she'll die in combat before she's able to heal herself up with her healing ability. Innate mirror image through glamour is nice, but if she's clearing out indies eventually enough lucky shots will get through and she doesn't have invulnerability or anything to mitigate those. Seems like an even-more-fragile Virtue for Eastern nations, although slightly cheaper since she's 50 points less and starts out with Astral.
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Nov 7, 2013 16:21
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Oh yeah, about site frequency having been changed in Dom4: http://z7.invisionfree.com/Dom3mods/index.php?showtopic=1585 There's generally less sites as a whole, but there's also been a lot more higher level sites than lower level ones introduced.
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Nov 7, 2013 16:26
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Hrm, comparing her to the dominions 4 virtue it seems she comes up a little short. On the other hand the glamour and the awe are good, she has shock resistance that is high enough to eat thunder strikes, she is super hard to pin down on the strategic map because of glamour and can heal her afflictions(Just tested this). The astral is risky for a someone to use as a super combatant but my favorite magic schools are astral and air so I am biased. She is not an awake expander but is cool midgame. I just think she is awesome mid game, although I am a noob.
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Nov 7, 2013 16:44
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Roland Jones posted:The narrative of Agartha is fine. Them being dramatically weaker then most other nations is not. The level of imbalance here and how useless a lot of things are are not good game design. Yeah, I played them a little more after I posted that and they don't have a lot of options. I suppose they could use some buffs to make them more enjoyable to play, but I do think there's some charm in the tragedy of a nation that can't win. People will still play it.
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Nov 7, 2013 18:38
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jBrereton posted:Their Pale One units are pretty much Super Bad. Awful attack and defence ratings mean they get spanked by anything hardier than indie Light Infantry. In EA Agartha, which is all about the Pale Ones, this is a huge problem. I'm playing EA Agartha right now in an MP game, and while it's a newbie game and not as cutthroat, the earth readers have a lot of (mostly non-combat) versatility once you have a nice pile of them. They are still overpriced for what you get and the amount of randomness can absolutely screw you in the early game, but I don't hate them. That said, I think making the oracles StR and cap only is pretty criminal, and the old age thing is pretty gratuitous. In dom3 the water oracles were (kinda) considered a reasonable thug chasis but for dom4 I just don't see it, and trying to use them that way in single player has been pretty underwhelming in my tests. My feeling is the way they're going to try to balance Agratha is that it's not going to be a quick statline/cost/production fix but something way more quirky and hard to quantify. I've preemptively thought about and rejected all the following ideas: 1) Some kind of national darkness spell that's easier to get/cast Darkness doesn't really do enough to make their line troops effective, and a surprising amount of units have partial darkvision. Maybe if there was also a spell/ability that made their line troops/sacreds buffed by darkness it would matter, but almost not even then. 2) Give them better water troops Wet ones are a loving shameful, pointless unit. I cannot think of any situation in which it makes sense to build them, but the problem with beefing up Agratha underwater is that they're still not going to be an aquatic nation unless there are no underwater nations at all. 3) Increase their precision/attack/defense and keep the cost almost the same This is just a straightforward stat increase and not very interesting. A few of Agratha balance mods I've seen do something like this and it just gets them to other nations' baseline, it doesn't make them competitive against most elite/sacred troops. 4) More/Better/Different national summons? This is kind of what they did for MA Agratha, and it does absolutely nothing to balance things, because they're a) not that good and b)it assumes a lavish gem income. I actually like all the EA Agratha summons, but they're only situationally useful and they don't synergize with the line units or national mages very well. So yeah, I predict the patch will not satisfy people who don't already feel some strange predilection for Agratha, but they're still my favorite EA nation.
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Nov 7, 2013 21:49
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Chaos power, ice power, seasonal powers and the like already exist. Dark power would seem like a fairly obvious step.
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Nov 7, 2013 21:54
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I think dark power is actually already a thing, a few summons have it here and there.
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Nov 7, 2013 22:18
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I think it'd be interesting if all Agarthan units had inherent low-level regeneration, with very little else changed, kind of like how most Pan units have recuperation. It'd be thematically appropriate with the "cave salamanders that never die and only grow larger with age" stuff and it'd give them another unique twist since I don't think there are many other recruitable regen units in the game, excepting skinshifters.
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Nov 7, 2013 23:36
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GenericOverusedName posted:I think dark power is actually already a thing, a few summons have it here and there. Fiends of Darkness have it.
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Nov 7, 2013 23:38
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Smerdyakov posted:My feeling is the way they're going to try to balance Agratha is that it's not going to be a quick statline/cost/production fix but something way more quirky and hard to quantify. Balancing stuff is 'boring'. Adding a couple of points of att/def, and maybe a national battlefield H3 that increases sacreds' Precision by 3 points, too dull. Getting them to a level playing field with other nations? Shameful homogenisation! So instead we'll get a whole new set of mechanics going on, and a bunch of new lore, which I'm sure is fun to work on, but ehhh. Cave summons and the like are not the fix - how many maps actually have caves? Not many. Valanis is very pretty, but not very well-balanced, as we're seeing in the LP. Other than Dawn of Dominions (Not A Real Map), I am scratching my head for other built-in maps with caves. Incidentally, the reason to pick up Wet Ones is for sieging purposes. Morale 8 Pale One Militia will probably run off if they take bow hits at all, which they certainly can.
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Nov 7, 2013 23:54
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The map generator hates placing caves and quite a lot of existing maps are dolled up randoms. They're supposed to be about 3% of provinces but you'll run into plenty of 200 province maps that don't roll them at all.
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Nov 7, 2013 23:58
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Do old, undead units still take the stat penalties for being old?
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Nov 8, 2013 00:07
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Think so, yep.
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Nov 8, 2013 00:08
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dis astranagant posted:The map generator hates placing caves and quite a lot of existing maps are dolled up randoms. They're supposed to be about 3% of provinces but you'll run into plenty of 200 province maps that don't roll them at all. Yeah, this is the problem with making them a "cave specials" nation--it screws them on all custom maps and most randomly generated maps. If the engine supports changing province types they could maybe make non-cave provinces into caves, but that would be more of a weird extra than something that balances them. The thing that makes them lose is the inefficiency of their line troops. I like the idea of adding 10% regen to all their units, but their awkward sizes usually mean they get ganged up on and die in a single round against anything better than light infantry. jBrereton posted:Incidentally, the reason to pick up Wet Ones is for sieging purposes. Morale 8 Pale One Militia will probably run off if they take bow hits at all, which they certainly can. That's at least plausible, but Wet Ones don't even have shields and sieging is one of the few areas where Agratha doesn't have problems, thanks to the bonus they get.
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Nov 8, 2013 00:24
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King of Bleh posted:I think it'd be interesting if all Agarthan units had inherent low-level regeneration, with very little else changed, kind of like how most Pan units have recuperation. It'd be thematically appropriate with the "cave salamanders that never die and only grow larger with age" stuff and it'd give them another unique twist since I don't think there are many other recruitable regen units in the game, excepting skinshifters.
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Nov 8, 2013 00:51
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-Troika- posted:Do old, undead units still take the stat penalties for being old? You can bring back dead heroes as mummies. This can be problematic if your dead hero was much older than a mummy should be (500 years for old age for mummies, I think).
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Nov 8, 2013 01:20
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yeah, some super old units, like vastnesses, become nearly useless due to huge old age penalties (turning a vastness into a humanoid mummy is a silly idea to begin with)
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Nov 8, 2013 01:24
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Flavahbeast posted:yeah, some super old units, like vastnesses, become nearly useless due to huge old age penalties (turning a vastness into a humanoid mummy is a silly idea to begin with) Collect all its balls and wrap them in cloth in a vague humanoid shape. Why does that not make sense?
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Nov 8, 2013 01:26
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Asehujiko posted:Inverted old age penalties that make them stronger to go with their "never die of old age" theme? I like this. Maybe take the lazy way out and have them all start with 3 xp stars, 4 on the mages. jBrereton posted:Yeah. This is the big problem with Illwinter. I like their approach, just upping stats is boring.
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Nov 8, 2013 01:37
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Flavahbeast posted:yeah, some super old units, like vastnesses, become nearly useless due to huge old age penalties (turning a vastness into a humanoid mummy is a silly idea to begin with) Wait, I thought a vastness was a mobile zone of contorted space from beyond the spheres? How the hell does it get old age penalties?
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Nov 8, 2013 01:47
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OwlFancier posted:Wait, I thought a vastness was a mobile zone of contorted space from beyond the spheres? It experiences time (not like we do, but it does experience time. Therefore it has an age. It doesn't get old, but mummies do.
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Nov 8, 2013 01:51
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Asehujiko posted:Inverted old age penalties that make them stronger to go with their "never die of old age" theme? The fact that they don't already do this for Agartha and Atlantis is shameful as hell. I thought Agartha also had the problem of incredibly poo poo path diversity and incredibly poo poo noncap mages? It's pretty loving hard to compensate for "lovely magic" with any nation.
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Nov 8, 2013 02:59
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Superterranean posted:It experiences time (not like we do, but it does experience time. Therefore it has an age. It doesn't get old, but mummies do. Well yes, but how does it incur a penalty from that? Obviously everything not in control of the flow of time will have an age, but surely it doesn't suffer from old age on a human timescale, which I thought was the implication? Edit: Oh wait, you mean when it turns into a mummy it suddenly gets hit with old age penalties because it's now mummy-type? If so that makes more sense, I thought the statement was that everything now takes old age penalties from the get go.
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Nov 8, 2013 03:02
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Asehujiko posted:Inverted old age penalties that make them stronger to go with their "never die of old age" theme? On 'fixing balance with stats is boring', Jesus H Christ. It's an important part of a competitive game which is a big time investment. If you want to play inefficiently for 'roleplaying reasons' within a balanced framework, go ahead. Whatever. Asking people to put months into a game where some factions are significantly mechanically better than others, though, just not right.
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Nov 8, 2013 03:13
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Some things don't seem to have a really obvious solution like changing stats, like for Caelum's infantry being worthless due to flying fatigue or the fact Bowl of Blood has pretty much no use. But I agree that that should be the exception, not the rule. Bringing down blood vengenace to a penetration 10 check (it seems like it's penetration 12 as of the moment) would solve the problem of it being OP yet still make it viable unlike what B9 was in Dom3.
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Nov 8, 2013 03:47
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jBrereton posted:On 'fixing balance with stats is boring', Jesus H Christ. It's an important part of a competitive game which is a big time investment. If you want to play inefficiently for 'roleplaying reasons' within a balanced framework, go ahead. Whatever. Asking people to put months into a game where some factions are significantly mechanically better than others, though, just not right. I think it's more of the idea that they want to bring the nation up to par in ways other than just giving pale ones the same statline as a human. I think they were talking about adding in mindblasting olms last I heard. Those would go a long way towards helping out - it's much easier to hit a paralyzed target! On that note, how do nets work? If they don't need an attack roll to hit, they could really buff up some classes of Agarthan infantry while still being thematically appropriate.
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Nov 8, 2013 03:54
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jBrereton posted:Asking people to put months into a game where some factions are significantly mechanically better than others, though, just not right. This is one of those things you just have to make peace with if you want to play Dominions. The game is not and will never be balanced the way something like SC2 is. You'll be much happier if you can appreciate it for what it does well than if you're constantly looking for it to be something it's just not made for. That said, 1/turn hydras is still loving bullshit and I would stand outside Kristoffer's office with angry signs if I had time to fly to Sweden.
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Nov 8, 2013 03:56
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Irony.or.Death posted:That said, 1/turn hydras is still loving bullshit and I would stand outside Kristoffer's office with angry signs if I had time to fly to Sweden. You're right, they should be slow to recruit! 
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Nov 8, 2013 03:57
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amuayse posted:Some things don't seem to have a really obvious solution like changing stats, like for Caelum's infantry being worthless due to flying fatigue or the fact Bowl of Blood has pretty much no use. But I agree that that should be the exception, not the rule. Bringing down blood vengenace to a penetration 10 check (it seems like it's penetration 12 as of the moment) would solve the problem of it being OP yet still make it viable unlike what B9 was in Dom3. Calum infantry - lower encumbrance to 1 or 2. Problem solved. Why is bowl of blood worthless? You might get a discount site!
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Nov 8, 2013 04:09
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Irony.or.Death posted:This is one of those things you just have to make peace with if you want to play Dominions. 
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Nov 8, 2013 04:18
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| # ? May 13, 2024 14:42 |
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builds character posted:Calum infantry - lower encumbrance to 1 or 2. Problem solved. 1. They scatter when they fly so they can't sustain useful formation 2. Since you're entering the fight at 20 fatigue anyways, it doesn't really matter if you have less encumbrance because you still get hacked to pieces 3. Their size and low health means they are big and flimsy targets I wouldn't say their melee weapons and armor suck, because it does quite well on the Atlantians of the LA. Shortbows kind of suck though, and flaming arrows isn't a great option considering the fact 1. You don't have native firepaths and 2. You're probably going to throw up storm and mist anyways Bowl of Blood isn't that great because of the ridiculous rarity of blood sites that aren't level 0 and you give up 5 blood slaves for it.
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Nov 8, 2013 04:33
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