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TheDemon posted:The trick is not that you can't be defeated by someone pulling out a nasty surprise like that SC. Yeah the second battle was dumb, but I figured I had a decent chance of taking him on in 1 candle of dominion as opposed to 6 or 7. Also Caelum kind of prevented me from putting together a counter, my research at that point was garbage due to putting all my income into trying to take Marverni's cap ASAP. I was also hosed by having a completely terrible spawn. I think we were playing on Dawn of Dominions, and I ended up starting in the middle of a massive swamp with nothing but low-pop low-resource provinces.
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Dec 22, 2014 05:19
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Eschatos posted:Yall are gonna laugh but I actually managed to lose as Helheim vs Marverni once. I easily crushed his armies and started sieging his capital with a bunch of (I think N9?) Helhirdings. Then his god woke up, put on all the gear he had already forged for it, and hosed my poo poo up. Shortly after Caelum snuck a horde of flyers onto my capital and effectively ended me. Then /domg/ immortalized the event with some images. This is awesome.
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Dec 22, 2014 05:26
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i wish the game had more room for stuff like that instead of it boiling down to the same handful of tired strategies
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Dec 22, 2014 09:19
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The more I hear you guys talk about it, the more I realize that this game suffers from the same problem as Eador; it's a strategy game with incredible depth and variety but you never get to experience most of it because the optimal strategy is basically to rush and end the game as fast as humanly possible.
Jabarto fucked around with this message at 10:21 on Dec 22, 2014 |
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Dec 22, 2014 10:18
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Jabarto posted:The more I hear you guys talk about it, the more I realize that this game suffers from the same problem as Eador; it's a strategy game with incredible depth and variety but you never get to experience most of it because the optimal strategy is basically to rush and end the game as fast as humanly possible. Forts are hard to siege and break in, which serves as anti-rush system in a way, as your capital starts (usually) with a maxed fort. The only way to defeat someone in the early game is to pour 100% of your resources in that, which should be left you open to a third player invading you. But it's true that going aggressive is usually good, so if you are playing "right" and the Thrones setup doesn't oblige your to take all of them, a player can win without the game reaching the stage of levels 8-9 magic, which is a pity.
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Dec 22, 2014 10:43
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That's why I sometimes get frustrated but whatever. 
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Dec 22, 2014 11:08
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Holy poo poo.
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Dec 22, 2014 11:16
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That picture is loving amazing
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Dec 22, 2014 11:22
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yes
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Dec 22, 2014 11:26
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Neruz posted:Why the hell are niffles in neutral or better heat? Unless you are staying in your dom until you have wolven winter you will be in neutral heat a lot. I take h1 as ponymen if niefels are in the game and put the points in growth.
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Dec 22, 2014 15:40
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Jabarto posted:The more I hear you guys talk about it, the more I realize that this game suffers from the same problem as Eador; it's a strategy game with incredible depth and variety but you never get to experience most of it because the optimal strategy is basically to rush and end the game as fast as humanly possible. This is wrong edit: Holy poo poo that picture is unbelievable I Love You! fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Dec 22, 2014 |
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Dec 22, 2014 16:24
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The game is at the same time simple and complex, and I like that duality. Simple, well, it isn't a 4x game with several systems like politics, culture, religion, special resources, economy, trade, etc. It's more direct, you recruit an army, you take provinces in a province-divided map, you only build 3 buildings: forts for troops, temple for priests, lab for mages. That's it. And complex because the sheer quantity of options in troops, summons, rituals and battle spells, items, path boosting, builds suppose an incredible amount of combos, and because the hidden depth in the combat once you read the details in the manual.
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Dec 22, 2014 16:52
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Jabarto posted:The more I hear you guys talk about it, the more I realize that this game suffers from the same problem as Eador; it's a strategy game with incredible depth and variety but you never get to experience most of it because the optimal strategy is basically to rush and end the game as fast as humanly possible. Power curves vary widely by nation and strategy. There are a lot that don't have much business doing anything but stomping indies and making nice early on but are still quite capable of winning the game. Diplomacy is a huge factor in these kinds of things and if you just mindlessly rush people you will lose.
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Dec 22, 2014 16:57
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Jabarto posted:The more I hear you guys talk about it, the more I realize that this game suffers from the same problem as Eador; it's a strategy game with incredible depth and variety but you never get to experience most of it because the optimal strategy is basically to rush and end the game as fast as humanly possible. I can't think of any endgames I've been in where there wasn't a variety of troops, magic, summons, items and strategies used by the final participants. Most games I'm in now I see go to 8+ tiers of magic, but there's a huge amount of interaction already in the 5-6 range of tiers in terms of how that impacts battle magic. I started typing up different strategies that people employ in actual games and it got to the point where this post would be stupid long.
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Dec 22, 2014 17:46
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Also remember Jabarto only plays single player so it's probably not worth debating multiplayer stuff with him, you guys have been tricked into this foolish trap YET AGAIN In SP yeah just rush endgame poo poo the AI doesn't care about your pretty counters and tactics. Have Some Flowers! posted:I can't think of any endgames I've been in where there wasn't a variety of troops, magic, summons, items and strategies used by the final participants. Most games I'm in now I see go to 8+ tiers of magic, but there's a huge amount of interaction already in the 5-6 range of tiers in terms of how that impacts battle magic. Well there was that one game I won as Atlantis where I built 100 temples I Love You! fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Dec 22, 2014 |
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Dec 22, 2014 18:14
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Rushes can be strong but no game is won during the rush phase, once the dust clears you still have a bunch of nations working up their mid-lategame power curves, so even if a few players are eliminated early on the game is still to play for. I don't think the game suffers from that - I think it would suffer more if rushes weren't a viable strategy, though it is a shame that some nations have such strong rush potential and some others are so weak early that almost no amount of skillful execution can save you from being eaten alive by double bless Anakites or Vanheres or something. However, even if the person with the double bless Anakites or Vanheres secures an early lead, that's far from saying that they're going to win the game, since other players may well have comparable territories without having gone for lovely turmoil death drain scales. And at least if you're the one who gets rushed early and dies you can just join a new game and try again.
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Dec 22, 2014 18:17
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Also, I don't think rushes would work on the new feature of Dom4: Disciple games.
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Dec 22, 2014 18:20
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Boing posted:though it is a shame that some nations have such strong rush potential and some others are so weak early that almost no amount of skillful execution can save you from being eaten alive by double bless Anakites or Vanheres or something I Love You! posted:Well there was that one game I won as Atlantis where I built 100 temples
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Dec 22, 2014 18:34
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Rushes also seem like they have to be planned out pretty carefully. In some strategy games an early rush just gives you a massive power advantage that guarantees domination if done early enough and to good enough effect. In Dom4 rushing early might net you a bunch of territory and yet ensure you actually lose, because you overcommitted to taking it or you grew too quickly and are now a huge diplomatic threat. There is a point of being probably too big to fail in Dominions, but it doesn't appear that point is reached in the early game. Stuff like infrastructure and research demands, battle magic setups and mage recruitment critical mass, etc. all appear to be the points at which one can have a reasonable chance of clinching the game, and even that's never certain. Rolling over your neighbor with a stack of blessed sacreds doesn't appear to be a guarantee of long-term success even if you suffer few to no losses, and the risk is that you could take those nasty losses and lose the game outright despite "winning" that first rush. At least it doesn't remind me at all of Civ where you pretty much want to eat a couple neighbors as soon as is reasonably possible, with a geometric effect on later power as a result. Gaining a bunch of provinces isn't as big of a momentum swing in Dominions, and taking enemy forts is kind of a long and painful process unless the defender just rolls over (which they don't have to do and often don't because of spite, which is a great mechanic to see when people in MP games refuse to give up and become a huge pain in the rear end).
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Dec 22, 2014 18:36
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Have Some Flowers! posted:I agree here and do wish some tweaking was done for the nations that have no teeth in the early game. Yeah I mean you guys did plenty of research and had troop diversity. I had vengeful waters, dark skies, bot, 100 temples and no real army or tactics and never fought a real battle. Moral is to not let someone just rush for the end game, duhhhhh And yeah I'd like to see nations like Berytos be worth a flying gently caress but good luck surviving literally anyone who wants to punch you at the start. I have NEVER seen Berytos (or several other nations) survive the early game, at all.
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Dec 22, 2014 18:46
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I Love You! posted:
Funny. I remember Berytos being considered top tier nation, from the new nations of Dom4. In fact, their income bonus was nerfed in a patch.
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Dec 22, 2014 19:29
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Turin Turambar posted:Funny. I remember Berytos being considered top tier nation, from the new nations of Dom4. In fact, their income bonus was nerfed in a patch. They were never actually any good, they were top 10 if literally everyone plays a super-passive NAP-as-default strategy. If the first time you enter combat with another nation is somewhere around turn 25 or 30, then sure Berytos was great. In terms of nations that can survive a rush or even moderate early aggression in EA they are at the very bottom of the pack and, as fate will have it, EA is the most rush-centric age due to incredibly powerful sacreds across the board. Berytos has exactly one sort-of-early game option against a heavy rush and that is Flaming Arrows, so if you get hit before that or they bring any sort of counter whatseover you are going to have an army parked on your cap by the middle of year 2. If you start next to Berytos and you have a bless there is no reason not to just absorb them immediately since you probably won't even lose anything meaningful doing so. Their sacreds are terrible and can't sail, their regular troops are generic, their archers are cheap but unimpressive, and their mages are not early-game powerhouses. They can't even really spam fire imps very well because they lack good undead leadship (especially with sailing) to properly ferry around said troops, which would otherwise be their best bet for winning a chaff war. There are other dom4 communities where people mostly sit around making friends and carefully taking one province every other turn and while this style of play is pretty drat awful if you can get in a game like this then by all means play as Bery, their mid and lategame magic is fantastic. I Love You! fucked around with this message at 19:44 on Dec 22, 2014 |
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Dec 22, 2014 19:40
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(moving a conv. from the games thread to here)FnF posted:[...] even if I did make the fatal mistake with MA Pythium of not taking an N9E4 bless (always always take this). I Love You! posted:Pyth doesn't need the E4 if it has N9, the e4 does virtually nothing considering your regen on slaves is worth like ~20 points of reinvig. The E4 isn't just for your comm. slaves, it's also for your harbingers. I've had more than one battle where they've fallen unconscious just because the battle's gone on for so long. Pythium typically doesn't have an abundance of N or E gems to spend on reinvig kit, so having it on the bless is some nice insurance. Also, in my anecdotal experience, it seems like it takes far less than 20 points of fatigue to take off 1HP from a typical comm. slave, and that they don't last as long as you'd think they would. Edit : I'm sure an awake / dormant N9 SC would be pretty potent, but if you're going for scales then the E4 is easy to pick up. FnF fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Dec 22, 2014 |
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Dec 22, 2014 19:56
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If your SC god dies and loses magic paths does that affect your bless?
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Dec 22, 2014 20:25
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No, thankfully! Although, you can't empower yourself to a better bless either.
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Dec 22, 2014 20:34
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Kitfox88 posted:That picture is loving amazing Here's the rest of my /domg/ images folder. As usual with 4chan, it's pretty hit or miss.
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Dec 22, 2014 22:28
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Eschatos posted:Here's the rest of my /domg/ images folder. As usual with 4chan, it's pretty hit or miss. Hah, the spinning goat demon thing is pretty good!
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Dec 22, 2014 22:41
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I Love You! posted:Also remember Jabarto only plays single player so it's probably not worth debating multiplayer stuff with him, you guys have been tricked into this foolish trap YET AGAIN Christ dude what is your problem?
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Dec 22, 2014 23:03
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Jabarto posted:The more I hear you guys talk about it, the more I realize that this game suffers from the same problem as Eador; it's a strategy game with incredible depth and variety but you never get to experience most of it because the optimal strategy is basically to rush and end the game as fast as humanly possible. If you interpret ending the game as fast as possible as losing and rushing as losing your army, then yes.
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Dec 22, 2014 23:13
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This is also why some of us really like Disciples games, because they create a space for those flawed nations to shine. If your teammates are providing you with some cover or making it so you can have a bless and an awake god to expand, sometimes those weak nations suddenly become very relevant. LA Jomon and LA Marignon are two really good examples of nations that need help but can go nuts with a team's income and support.
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Dec 22, 2014 23:18
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Libluini posted:If you interpret ending the game as fast as possible as losing and rushing as losing your army, then yes. By rushing I mean the aggressive early wars that you guys just spent the last three pages discussing.
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Dec 22, 2014 23:46
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The aggressive early wars only end the game for one player per war generally, the survivors still have to deal with everyone else.
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Dec 23, 2014 00:42
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N9E4 is for squares
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Dec 23, 2014 01:29
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Jabarto posted:By rushing I mean the aggressive early wars that you guys just spent the last three pages discussing. The key thing you're forgetting is that the game may end early FOR YOU, but that in multiplayer other people keep playing, often for months after you die.
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Dec 23, 2014 01:31
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Smerdyakov posted:The key thing you're forgetting is that the game may end early FOR YOU, but that in multiplayer other people keep playing, often for months after you die. Fair enough.
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Dec 23, 2014 01:33
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Smerdyakov posted:The key thing you're forgetting is that the game may end early FOR YOU, but that in multiplayer other people keep playing, often for months after you die. Who cares about those other people though. 
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Dec 23, 2014 01:35
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Aggressive early wars also tend to piss off your neighbours who may just invade you in return while your armies are busy and bam! you got yourself a two front war.
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Dec 23, 2014 01:35
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Jabarto posted:By rushing I mean the aggressive early wars that you guys just spent the last three pages discussing. I meant the same thing.
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Dec 23, 2014 01:49
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I think I figured out how to play MA Tien Chi without getting killed by your neighbors 1. Take W9 for your Red Guards for early game 2. Recruit Geomancers for Meteors and Celestial Masters for Wind Guide in mid game 3. Do late game communion stuff
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Dec 23, 2014 01:50
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toerrishuman aka mangame has ended on turn 92 with a MA Vanheim win as the last remaining players tapped out. It ended in a typical horrorpocalypse. This was the game where pretenders had to be the regular scrubby dom1 lots-of-path humans. Mine was:  Money scales and Magic to try and offset Vanheim's awful research, with paths for lots of booster options. I went Imprisoned because I didn't expect to need the booster bootstraps until later anyway. MA Vanheim is one of very few nations that I think you can do just fine with without investing in a Bless or an awake god. Skinshifters are easy to apply, and you have air magic to survive into the midgame. My strategy was to sail around with giant piles of Skinshifters, claim good coastal territory with lots of population and then dig into Blood. This worked well. Planning on sailing from the beginning was important, because I was locked into a peninsula with C'tis blocking my way out. That would have meant pushing through disease dominion and beating skeleton spam + Rigor Mortis with Air magic (not a great matchup for Air overall). Afterwards, all my troops/mages would have gone into their next war diseased... and that would have been awful. Instead, I sailed off to find weakened players and zombie AI to clean up, and I used C'tis's hostile dom as a wall to keep people from invading Vanheim proper.  Glad we know how to sail, boys I think C'tis figured there was no point in fighting me at my 'strongest' early on, and I think he planned to come back and finish me off sometime in the future... then he got locked into wars and it was never an option for him. After getting fat on dogpiled players/AI for a bit, I picked my first real war with Libluini's Jotunheim. I had spent roughly 18 turns individually empowering Vanjarl to B2 and summoning Storm Demons one by one. The result was over 100 Storm Demons with 2 dozen+ Vanjarls slinging Thunderstrikes. The ice giants fell quickly, because he had been fighting totally different armies up to that point... and who masses Storm Demons that early in the game? He had a lot of juicy provinces for blood hunting and a High Magus site, which is important later. At this point (fairly early on), I was feeling confident I was going to win. I had a great position to go hard Blood from. I had very rich + defensible land to hold - pretty much everywhere was within 2-3 spaces of everywhere else because of sailing. It would be easy for me to throw my entire army and piles of mages at anyone who attacked. I was summoning dozens of Storm Demons a turn and had dozens of Vanjarls just roaming around fighting. It was premature. The main war of the game was against PainofMind's Ashdod. Despite the theme of crappy pretenders with crappy paths, Pain went with N9 E4 Ashdod giants and trampled several neighbors in the early game. He then fattened up on weak players/AI, researched like crazy with several sage sites, and began to bust out a factory of geared out Ditanus and Tarts from a Conj 20 bonus site. My first few fights against him were utter and total defeats. We're talking hundreds of storm demons and dozens of 290g Vanjarls dead in the first 2-3 fights without killing anything but skeleton chaff. He had put Storm Spools on every SC so Storm Demons could not hurt them, and they could live through Thunderstrikes. I thought I threw away the game. At this point, I retooled to begin a guerilla war. I began using Leech and blood Communions with Life-for-a-Life to instantly kill Ditanu SCs despite all their gear and blessings (Pain had the Awe throne for them for a while in addition to N9 E4). I gave up forts and provinces after Blood Hunting them up to 200+ Unrest, sneaking all the Vanjarls out in the process so they could hunt/fight another day. I sailed around to areas where his armies weren't to reclaim territory and keep income/slaves growing in my favor. I used the High Magus site from earlier to empower into Send Horror spam under Astral Corruption. My plan was just to run away from armies until Astral Corruption finished them off. It happened eventually, though I never got a Doom Horror in 30+ turns. But a Doom Horror did come kill some random N1 mage summoning wolves... go figure. That was the end of Mangame. And somehow Atlantis never got domkilled, despite being in single digit candles for... practically the entire game. The moral of the story is: sailing is amazing. It lets you have more control over your starting location, and it helps you move to where the easy fights are rather than picking the hard ones early on. Later on, it gives you mobility which is very important in long wars. And also Blood is ridiculous, but you all knew that. edit: almost forgot the graphs, http://imgur.com/a/FQAjV Have Some Flowers! fucked around with this message at 03:39 on Dec 23, 2014 |
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Dec 23, 2014 03:32
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