|
It really isn't abuse, as your god is still going to get hosed over if you do this. It is very nice having your hitpoints from last turn, but regen and affliction chance are based on what your hps should be. So if you're a 100 hp god, and jump in to -8 dom from +10 dom, you'll have 300 hp, but regen would only be 2/turn, and each hp damage will give you a 5% affliction chance... you end up surviving, but a wreck, if you have any serious opposition. And if you get diseased you probably can't leave  So, for example, in the hypothetical close fight, say you take 220 pts damage. Your god prevails, but on average has 11 afflictions. You would rather he were dead. archaeo fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Nov 23, 2013 |
#
?
Nov 23, 2013 17:54
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 12, 2024 05:35 |
|
|
Given enough arrows, B9N9E4-blessed giants CAN be killed. RIP 163 dead pygmies =(
|
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2013 01:19
|
|
|
N9 is overrated on giants.
|
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2013 01:32
|
|
|
amuayse posted:N9 is overrated on giants. That's a good point. Well said.
|
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2013 01:37
|
|
|
drat right. True Pantokrators know that B9W9F9A9 is the way to go!
|
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2013 01:40
|
|
|
I'd argue that N9 is the only thing keeping attrition low enough to make Niefel Giants worth recruiting. Otherwise they pick up too many afflictions and become useless pretty fast. E9's protection buff is a pretty big help, too.
|
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2013 05:18
|
|
|
Victor Vermis posted:Given enough arrows, B9N9E4-blessed giants CAN be killed. This should be in the OP. It's beautiful.
|
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2013 06:56
|
|
|
Victor Vermis posted:Given enough arrows, B9N9E4-blessed giants CAN be killed. Dominions 4: Everything Counts in Large Amounts.
|
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2013 07:40
|
|
|
amuayse posted:N9 is overrated on giants. Giants are overrated in general. I have never been able to get them to work for me. Their armor and defence are basically human standard, so they always get hit- and usually by the three guys in front of them. Meanwhile, they can only hit back at one person. Their troops are just bad in general. I would take mans anytime. Especially ponymans. 
|
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2013 09:46
|
|
|
This is confusing since I have read most people suggest giants for beginners.
|
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2013 10:05
|
|
|
goodness posted:This is confusing since I have read most people suggest giants for beginners. They are easy to understand, and will give you solid expansion.
|
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2013 10:07
|
|
|
goodness posted:This is confusing since I have read most people suggest giants for beginners. Giants are really good at killing province defence, and independents, and ais, because these are all stupid. People can theoretically do things like in that gif where a thousand gold of pygmies and a couple gems blow up four thousand gold of giants.
|
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2013 10:07
|
|
|
goodness posted:This is confusing since I have read most people suggest giants for beginners. Well, they tend to walk through indies as if they weren't there. (At least my giants did.) The problem with them is when players find ways to counter your giants. Then it goes down the toilet pretty fast. Edit: Beaten, gently caress.
|
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2013 10:14
|
|
|
giants are great, but you can't use them the same way against humans as you can against indeps. size bigger than 3 becomes a liability, so you have to go for squad mixing, using them as spell bait, etc. but hinnom size 3 giants, for example, or the megacheap ur size 3 giants are excellent and I'll take them over human units pretty much anytime. bless giants are a stomp vs indeps and they can give players trouble in the early game. if the new player can't handle early game they'll never get to mid or late game so sacred giants or even regular giants are a big hand up
|
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2013 10:21
|
|
|
Glamour nations imho are better for newbies.
|
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2013 17:02
|
|
|
Incy posted:I am unsure going construction first on any nation works. In a disciple game where you can preset your location (to be protected from actual enemies early on) it works. I also like Alt 2 Const 4, on some nations.
|
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2013 19:03
|
|
|
Victor Vermis posted:Given enough arrows, B9N9E4-blessed giants CAN be killed. I did win the battle, though, so that's what counts (not really). ChumleeWines will rise again (though probably not in this game)!
|
|
#
?
Nov 24, 2013 22:13
|
|
|
TheDemon posted:giants are great, but you can't use them the same way against humans as you can against indeps. size bigger than 3 becomes a liability, so you have to go for squad mixing, using them as spell bait, etc. but hinnom size 3 giants, for example, or the megacheap ur size 3 giants are excellent and I'll take them over human units pretty much anytime. I am in a game vs Ur right now. It is just me and a 3 other friends. I got EA atlantis with a scales build and an asleep pretender. The others are Yomi and Ulm. So Ur stands out as strong. We are going to team up on him. Anything particularly effective? They lack hats so a blade wind spam with basalt kings might be okay. Anything else that would be a good one to one counter? Some spearmen to hold the line and then some deep one shamblers to hit hard?
|
|
#
?
Nov 25, 2013 23:55
|
|
|
folytopo posted:I am in a game vs Ur right now. It is just me and a 3 other friends. I got EA atlantis with a scales build and an asleep pretender. The others are Yomi and Ulm. So Ur stands out as strong. We are going to team up on him. Anything particularly effective? They lack hats so a blade wind spam with basalt kings might be okay. Anything else that would be a good one to one counter? Some spearmen to hold the line and then some deep one shamblers to hit hard? Anything that isn't clearly garbage beyond buffing. Ur has uniformly poor equipment, very average stats, and size three everywhere. If it's early on, your Warriors of the Deep (the Basalt Spear ones) are going to clean house, because their attack density is likely to bring down Ur's already pretty low defence pretty hard. If you're running into MR-negates stuff, maybe not, though. Then again, not going to run into all that much of that with Ulm, Yomi and Ur in the game. The actual threat for you by a country mile is Ulm. A lot of units with some combination of bows, decent defence, and multiple attacks. Scary stuff. jBrereton fucked around with this message at 00:16 on Nov 26, 2013 |
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2013 00:13
|
|
|
dis astranagant posted:I'd argue that N9 is the only thing keeping attrition low enough to make Niefel Giants worth recruiting. Otherwise they pick up too many afflictions and become useless pretty fast. E9's protection buff is a pretty big help, too. I played Niefel a few weeks ago on this thread's recommendation (asking for nations that build thugs and early aggression). Skratti + skinshifters were obscene after an early investment in blood hunting and a site searching pretender. Probably the strongest year 1 army I've yet to put together in this game, and when you're murdering everything + sitting on EA gem income giants didn't even seem to matter unless I felt like upgrading my arrow catchers.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2013 02:18
|
|
|
TheresNoThyme posted:I played Niefel a few weeks ago on this thread's recommendation (asking for nations that build thugs and early aggression). Skratti + skinshifters were obscene after an early investment in blood hunting and a site searching pretender. Probably the strongest year 1 army I've yet to put together in this game, and when you're murdering everything + sitting on EA gem income giants didn't even seem to matter unless I felt like upgrading my arrow catchers. Skratti are even better with shrouds, especially now that you can't spam them as hard as you used to. With E9N9 you get 20 prot, 12/turn regeneration and no fatigue in werewolf form. You're just that much better at not dying and you can also cheap out and use Jotun Jarls with frost brands if you have to. It's just harder to justify running scales Niefel with the new lower return on investment. Skinshifters die really easily compared to e9n9 Niefels and you can't even spam them anymore since they're 5/turn now. dis astranagant fucked around with this message at 02:34 on Nov 26, 2013 |
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2013 02:29
|
|
|
I kinda fancy a 5/turn Jag limit, on thinking about how to reform the Mictlan meta.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2013 02:36
|
|
|
dis astranagant posted:Skratti are even better with shrouds, especially now that you can't spam them as hard as you used to. With E9N9 you get 20 prot, 12/turn regeneration and no fatigue in werewolf form. You're just that much better at not dying and you can also cheap out and use Jotun Jarls with frost brands if you have to. I never played dom3 with this nation so the StR nerf was just something I played around without considering too much. It basically meant I had to get another fort up and running, which tbh felt like a fair nerf and also made my blood hunting easier to organize. In year 1 I never came close to having the kind of gold that would make the 5 skinshifter limit feel like an issue, probably because I was banking my extra gold towards a 2nd fort so I could pump out more skratti. I imagine I need to suck it up and play some MP since I obviously don't know how much survivability skratti "need" to stack up against competent opponents, but with a bunch of quickened flesheaters/vineshields in year one I had zero problem with the AI armies which throw enough chaff at you to make me think a bigger problem would be competent caster counters & legit SC's, both of which don't care much about E9/N9.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2013 02:52
|
|
|
On the subject of jags, W9A9B9 is great for survibability. In expansion test games, I was able to make an indie taking army every two turns and even with crap scales I had tons of cash left to spend on infrastructure and mages.
amuayse fucked around with this message at 02:57 on Nov 26, 2013 |
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2013 02:54
|
|
|
Im just going to reiterate that MA Ermor is 100% unfun to fight against and should still retain its instaban status that it had as LA Ermor in Dom3. This is especially true with the fact you can now beef up fort defence to stupid high levels.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2013 06:24
|
|
|
LordLeckie posted:Im just going to reiterate that MA Ermor is 100% unfun to fight against and should still retain its instaban status that it had as LA Ermor in Dom3. This is especially true with the fact you can now beef up fort defence to stupid high levels. As the Ermor Player your up against (Viola). I'll add my experience of the game so far - I've never played Ermor before (even in Dom 3) and was wanting to try something different for my first Dom 4 MP experience. A part of me is  that your not enjoying the game, but being the competitive game that it is, if your not having fun it means I am of course doing something right. Since about turn 15 I've been fighting a 3 front war vs Vanheim, C'tis and yourself as Machaka...it seemed pretty grim there for a while there was a hightide mark when I had very little provinces but the nature of Ermor's dominion allowed me to push back and try for a headshot against C'tis and the acquistion of some of Vanheim's lands...however throw in Marignon which invaded from the west with what seemed like a HUGE gently caress off army of nasty banishment, dominion smashing priest/inquisitor commanders. Atlantis also went what the heck and jumped out of the ocean and on too land a few turns ago and Vanarus assures me he's gunning for me too. I'll add I've not actually been the aggressive force in the game - I've not attacked anyone so far though you might say a Dom 10 death3/turmoil3 scales aren't going to win any favours from people. Given that the best way for me to recruit troops was to spam forts/w temples I did that as much as I could and is the only reason I'm still in the game. I did lose 3 forts in progress while they were being made which was frustrating but inevitable. The 2 I built on our border had me sweating when they were going up as you were raiding around quite unpredictably with those big scary spider armies of yours. It's been a helluva lot of fun so far, I haven't been able to deal a fatal blow to anyone....I came so so close at a headshot at C'tis capital at around turn 20-25 but my Pretender derped and died, my legion collapsing with no leadership. Not being able to get a dominion foothold in the eastern part of C'tis (your northern border with C'tis) was very much a godsend for him and has allowed him to bounce back to some degree as most of his holdings are untouced from my Dominion. He actually took my fort up there last turn which I was able to do very little about. Vanheim, got hit really hard by my dominion early on due to the cultist random event x 2 early on which gave me a heap of Serpent cataphract commanders and cultists as well as instant 10 dominion in that particular province. We had an early NAP that he turned his back on....but he was never really able to expand very well and his small amounts of sacreds that he was able to muster were invariably trampled over by the masses of dead. I noticed last turn he's gone AI...not surprising with a powerful Vanarus on one flank, a powerful Marignon on the north, Atlantis with an ocean to itself to the south and useless wastelands to the west. But to respond to your initial complaint about Ermor - yes it does feel like there are some definite strengths that almost feel like exploits....on the other hand Ermor has some very real weaknesses too.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2013 07:16
|
|
|
Neif posted:I've not attacked anyone so far though you might say a Dom 10 death3/turmoil3 scales aren't going to win any favours from people. quote:Vanheim, got hit really hard by my dominion early on due to the cultist random event x 2 early on which gave me a heap of Serpent cataphract commanders and cultists as well as instant 10 dominion in that particular province.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2013 07:40
|
|
|
There is a bug in the current version where mindless units do not get their siege defense penalty. This probably makes ermor a pain in the butt.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2013 07:43
|
|
|
Neif posted:Not being able to get a dominion foothold in the eastern part of C'tis (your northern border with C'tis) was very much a godsend for him and has allowed him to bounce back to some degree as most of his holdings are untouced from my Dominion. He actually took my fort up there last turn which I was able to do very little about. I pushed my dom very hard, for just that reason. I knew I was going to take it in the teeth attacking Ermor the moment I met them, but without doing that I would have been even worse off in the long run.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2013 08:29
|
|
|
Vanheim in Viola here, just throwing in my tuppence and trying to set the record straight...Neif posted:We had an early NAP that he turned his back on.... We never agreed on a lasting NAP - I proposed a truce at about turn 4 (after that event completely kneecapped me), you offered me a choice between a longer-lasting NAP and a more temporary truce. To which I said that I would go for a 10-turn truce and then revisit it. This was on about turn 6-7. As I heard nothing back from you, I presumed that was what had been agreed. And I purposefully did nothing until turn 18-19, i.e. waiting until the 10-turn truce had lapsed. I would never have broken an agreement, and I do not want anyone thinking that. If I misunderstood our arrangement, I apologise and will be more explicit in the future. However, as Ermor you've got to expect people to be gearing up to fight you as soon as you meet. Given the choice between a long NAP and a short-term truce, it'll be the truce pretty much every time as both sides must know that war is (a) inevitable, and (b) the non-Ermor side needs to start it as early as possible before their lands are rendered utterly, completely useless. Tl,dr; Vanheim didn't break a NAP, he waited until the agreed 10-turn truce had lapsed. If that's bad Edit: meant to say bad form, not bad play. Bad play's pretty much guarranteed 
FnF fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Nov 26, 2013 |
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2013 10:28
|
|
|
FnF posted:Tl,dr; Vanheim didn't break a NAP, he waited until the agreed 10-turn truce had lapsed. If that's bad play, please tell me what I should have done instead! Honestly, as someone who has won a game as Ashen Empire Ermor, I neither asked for, or expected anyone to keep, diplomatic deals with me. All the normal rules go out the window when fighting the Apocalypse Made Manifest.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2013 10:32
|
|
|
Neif posted:Vanheim, got hit really hard by my dominion early on due to the cultist random event x 2 early on which gave me a heap of Serpent cataphract commanders and cultists as well as instant 10 dominion in that particular province. We had an early NAP that he turned his back on....but he was never really able to expand very well and his small amounts of sacreds that he was able to muster were invariably trampled over by the masses of dead. I noticed last turn he's gone AI...not surprising with a powerful Vanarus on one flank, a powerful Marignon on the north, Atlantis with an ocean to itself to the south and useless wastelands to the west. A WHAT EVENT? TEN loving DOMINION? JUST LIKE THAT? My god id throw every gem i had at you within a turn if id gotten a single event like that. But yes playing against ermor wasnt fun at all, i had to throw every nature gem i had into supply items and even then it wasnt enough let alone to try siege down a loving fort with 600 defence and countless undead inside. On top of that i was reliant on my spiders to attack you, i could have made pygmys for siege fodder but the thought of arrows even flaming arrows vs a ton of tower shields wasnt too attactrive. But yes i saw the "The enemys fort in wolvenmory is unharmed" far too many times, not a single turn passed where i made any progress on one single loving fort which is incredibly frustrating after i did my best to take as much land off you as possible. And now even with burden of time dispelled im completely hosed, 90% of my units now have old age and my cap only black sorcerors are now all diseased and dying. In short i have no land worth taking, no forts or land worth forting up at all leaving my research very poor and as such i dont really have many great ways to use my gems. Ill agree that Ermor has very real weaknesses and they are far from an autowin but they are still this: A problem for all their starting neighbours, they cause irreperable harm to everyone that is bordering them and make them easy prey, i have an AI Pythium to my south that has started butting its head against me at random while Vanarus slowly eats it up without contest so i have gone AI myself in disgust at the whole goddam situation as i legitimately have nothing to do during my turns at all as there is now no use for my diseased dying armies and mages and they cannot make even a tiny dent in your defences. Burnsaber posted:There is a bug in the current version where mindless units do not get their siege defense penalty. This probably makes ermor a pain in the butt. It makes forts completely unsiegeable i dont think any of us has even come close to breaking down a single fort even Marignon with over 400 units on ermors capital reported very little progress.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2013 11:35
|
|
|
Anyone else thinks that Dominions matched with the world of Steven Erikson's "Malazan Book of the Fallen" would make a great combination? All these different races, gods, ascendants, spirits... I hope that there will be a mod of some kind, although I highly doubt it. Fans of Dominions and fans of the book series are rather small circles, I don't think they overlap with each other so much.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2013 11:59
|
|
|
Ryoji posted:Anyone else thinks that Dominions matched with the world of Steven Erikson's "Malazan Book of the Fallen" would make a great combination? All these different races, gods, ascendants, spirits... There's a mod nation for dom3, it hasn't been updated to dom4 yet though.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2013 12:06
|
|
|
FnF posted:
Sorry I didn't meant to come across as portraying you as an oathbreaker - you kept to the NAP as required I was just being dramatic in my brief AAR. I fully expected you to attack, It was the most logical path to take and you played soundly. The random event next to your capital was really bad luck - I did notice you got a second identical event later on. I assume it has something to with your misfortune scales? LordLeckie posted:A WHAT EVENT? TEN loving DOMINION? JUST LIKE THAT? My god id throw every gem i had at you within a turn if id gotten a single event like that. But yes playing against ermor wasnt fun at all, i had to throw every nature gem i had into supply items and even then it wasnt enough let alone to try siege down a loving fort with 600 defence and countless undead inside. On top of that i was reliant on my spiders to attack you, i could have made pygmys for siege fodder but the thought of arrows even flaming arrows vs a ton of tower shields wasnt too attactrive. But yes i saw the "The enemys fort in wolvenmory is unharmed" far too many times, not a single turn passed where i made any progress on one single loving fort which is incredibly frustrating after i did my best to take as much land off you as possible. And now even with burden of time dispelled im completely hosed, 90% of my units now have old age and my cap only black sorcerors are now all diseased and dying. In short i have no land worth taking, no forts or land worth forting up at all leaving my research very poor and as such i dont really have many great ways to use my gems. The event is pretty sweet for Ermor, Goes something like "A bunch of Cultists worshipping the God of Death have taken X province" and you end up with some Serpent Cataphract commanders with purple robed human cultists. The Cataphracts are actually decent thugs, though I didn't really get a chance to kit them up. I didn't race for BoT until I saw Marignon's horde approaching. It was diplomatic suicide to cast it but the only way that I could see to deal with his mages/priests. Foul air was just the icing on the cake. The fact that your mages were fairly short lived made it an even better plan. There was no way I could confidently take your main army on without leaving other parts of my kingdom threadbare and potentially having a decisive lost that would put me out of the game. I honestly didn't know about the mindless/siege bug until a few posts ago and tbh I don't know how not to abuse it. I mean with everyone coming at me it seemed natural to bunker down and try and make some strides in research/let BoT take its course.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2013 12:36
|
|
|
Oh yeah im not angry at you for anything you did everything made perfect strategic sense and were good moves and you can hardly be blamed for something that is Illwinters fault, its just in the end the mechanics of ermor nigh guarantee a severe disadvantage to ermors neighbours even if you take them out early just by making a small patch of the world useless gold wise and extremely hard to put PD in.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2013 13:02
|
|
|
It's true, BoT fucks mari.  C'Tis should be doing OK with cheap lizard blockers and H3 banishment spammers, no?
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2013 14:00
|
|
|
builds character posted:It's true, BoT fucks mari. AS Mari in this game, yes, BoT hosed me hard. As has limited access to supply items. Not being able to siege down the forts is the worst problem, though. My plan was pretty much hit fast and hard with lots of flaming crossbows and pikemen. Things didn't work out as planned when it turned out that my entire 500+ army couldn't siege down a fort with 300 and change undead... And C'Tis should have done well, but from what I could tell on my end got hit and run over early before they could spam H3s.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2013 14:23
|
|
|
Log082 posted:AS Mari in this game, yes, BoT hosed me hard. As has limited access to supply items. Yeah it really cannot be emphasized enough at how loving bad the fort sieging is, they are 100% uncrackable there is NOTHING you can do about it and slowly domkilling a nation known for taking Dom 9/10 awake pretenders in 100% of builds is not going to happen in any reasonable period of time.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2013 14:25
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 12, 2024 05:35 |
|
|
Neif posted:But to respond to your initial complaint about Ermor - yes it does feel like there are some definite strengths that almost feel like exploits....on the other hand Ermor has some very real weaknesses too. Just for the record (for the billionth time), Ermor's never been banned around here because we think it's too powerful. It's just that they seriously distort the game; start next to them and while you might well win the war, you're going to lose the game because you just dumped a ton of resources into taking land that has no value while people who did not start next to them have been conquering land that produces gold.
|
|
#
?
Nov 26, 2013 14:33
|
|
