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Is there any way to improve your dominion in-game, or is it a purely chargen thing?
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# ? Oct 29, 2016 23:50 |
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# ? May 2, 2024 23:15 |
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I'm probably posting way too much, but it's been a rough day, so one more for the road. You cannot increase your Dominion score in-game outside of MAYBE some extremely rare events like claiming certain thrones (I'm not familiar with the effects of them all); like the bless effects, it's set in stone at the start. However, you can in practice bolster most of the effects Dominion has by building more temples. More temples means more successful temple checks regardless of your Dominion score, and temples even have the side benefit of raising the cap on how many Sacred units you can recruit in a turn just like higher domscore would. However, I don't think there's any normal way of increasing your innate Domscore or gaining the innate awe effect of 9 or 10 domscore if you don't already have it. Even Wishing for 'Dominion' just gives you candles, and similarly I believe that Wishing for magic paths can raise your Pretender's innate magic paths but will not improve their bless from the start of the game, nor can losing magic paths harm your bless from the start of the game (unless Dom4 has changed this, but I see no sources claiming as much).
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# ? Oct 29, 2016 23:58 |
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It also became far harder to domkill people a few patches ago, due to them changing the formula used for whether a temple check generates a candle or not. It's really hard to domkill people any more due to those changes, other than by blood sac. Currently the formula for whether a temple check generates a candle is 50% + (5% x Dom). It used to be 10% x Dom. Lord Koth fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Oct 30, 2016 |
# ? Oct 30, 2016 00:00 |
Shady Amish Terror posted:I'm probably posting way too much, but it's been a rough day, so one more for the road. I think building temples helps your chargen dom score, or it at the least helps it for the purposes of recruiting uniques as it gives you more 'holy points' for recruitment purposes. (Domkilling is very effective. TopSnek is in its final stages because I have gone whole-hog EA Pan bloodsac.)
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# ? Oct 30, 2016 21:59 |
5 temples per extra point up to ten, yep.
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# ? Oct 30, 2016 22:06 |
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Ramc posted:I think building temples helps your chargen dom score, or it at the least helps it for the purposes of recruiting uniques as it gives you more 'holy points' for recruitment purposes. I think I mentioned this, although jBrereton posted:5 temples per extra point up to ten, yep. I didn't have a number. Much appreciated. I thought it was four, but 1) I thought I might be wrong about the number, and 2) I apparently was wrong about the number.
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# ? Oct 30, 2016 22:10 |
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Shady Amish Terror posted:
Only takes building four for the first dom score boost (since you start with the needed fifth already - in your capitol), which might have been messing up your math.
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# ? Oct 30, 2016 22:25 |
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Since I started this game with a domstrength of 6 y'all can see how vulnerable we are to a neighbor with a (probable) domstrength of 9 or 10 who is aggressively pushing it via sacrifice. People are losing faith in The Might of Zionism
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# ? Oct 30, 2016 22:30 |
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Turn 22 Not much happens here on turn 22. Our roving band of site-searchers finds two new sites: Nothing special, oh well. Our new blood hunting mages capture a bunch of blood slaves, we now have plenty of fuel for sacrificing, and next turn we will have two more Holy 3 priests ripping the hearts from virgins for the glory of The Might of Zionism. We have two scouted battle reports, one of which is just a Mannish army killing Patala PD and besieging a fort. The other is of what looks to be Patala’s grand army, or at least the largest Patalan force we have seen in the field. Here it is killing a tiny Mannish siege force: The apes march to war! Pretty big bunch of apes! A Mannish army would likely still ruin it unless all those war elephants are placed just right and are able to rampage through Man’s lines. If I were Man I’d be concerned, but not terrified, of that doom stack. Speaking of being terrified, how is our Dominion doing? A sign of life! Hell yes! An uptick! Our mass temple-building and blood sacrificing has started to work. Next turn we will have even more sacrificing and more temples, I think we can turn this around. And I think we can turn it around for another reason as well; it looks like we have a coalition against the bats. Pangaea is on-board, Caelum is on the fence, and, most importantly, this turn we learned that Xibalba has invaded Patala as well. There are at least two Patalan forts being sieged by bats that I can see, which means that the bulk of his armies are going to be occupied far to the East! When Pangaea and I attack he is going to be involved in a 3-front war, a situation that even the most pro of Dominions 4 vets would struggle to overcome. We are moving our armies in the West towards the East, but because of the rugged mountainous and forested terrain it is slow going. We’re also bigly increasing our production of crossbowmen, with which we will turn bats into pincushions. In several turns should be ready for war!
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# ? Nov 3, 2016 04:26 |
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That is so many monkeys. I can already see the potential for those tiny elephant stacks routing through the mass and forcing an HP-route, though. Dominions can be really harsh to large armies sometimes.
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# ? Nov 3, 2016 05:53 |
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Shady Amish Terror posted:That is so many monkeys. I can already see the potential for those tiny elephant stacks routing through the mass and forcing an HP-route, though. Dominions can be really harsh to large armies sometimes. That is a lot of monkeys, but it is also a pretty vulnerable army as you seem to have clued in on. Patala is, unfortunately, pretty uniquely unprepared to fight Man. Man, as we've seen, is an archer nation, utilizing longbows and crossbows in huge numbers screened by Knights or heavy infantry. Patala has access to super cheap, easily massed archers, but they're shortbow archers, and thus they are dogshit in the Late Age. Patala also does not have -any- recruitable troops with which they can screen their archers! The largest shield you can get on an ape is a Buckler, which is barely technically a shield it is so small. Not to mention Patala has no troops outside of it's blessed Naga Warriors who can take on a squad of Man's knights. The odds are stacked pretty hard against the monkeys here.
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# ? Nov 3, 2016 16:22 |
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Shady Amish Terror posted:That is so many monkeys. I can already see the potential for those tiny elephant stacks routing through the mass and forcing an HP-route, though. Dominions can be really harsh to large armies sometimes. He also hasn't learned yet to always put the elephant-stacks together. Putting two of them on both sides of your army like that just maximizes the chance for a fleeing herd of elephants to plough through your own units. If you put them all together the chance of one group being in a position to do damage to your own army is halved. Putting the stupid 'phants far away from your main army is good, but after all that erratic movement of a long battle you'll never know where those two groups may end up. My mammoth-armies had all units concentrated in one large pile for that reason. Still, later on there were some battles where my armies escaped catastrophe just because my units can all fly, so they tended to be on the good side of my fleeing giant animals. It also helped immensely that my early game armies were basically the opposite of that Patala-army: Archers on the flanks, mammoths in the middle i]far away[/i] from the other units. The rest was positioned in front of the archers to leave my mammoths the maximum amount of free space. Elephant-type units always come with a risk, so I tend to always plan around a possible stampede at the worst moment.
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# ? Nov 3, 2016 18:44 |
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How are u posted:That is a lot of monkeys, but it is also a pretty vulnerable army as you seem to have clued in on. Patala is, unfortunately, pretty uniquely unprepared to fight Man. Man, as we've seen, is an archer nation, utilizing longbows and crossbows in huge numbers screened by Knights or heavy infantry. Patala has access to super cheap, easily massed archers, but they're shortbow archers, and thus they are dogshit in the Late Age. Patala also does not have -any- recruitable troops with which they can screen their archers! The largest shield you can get on an ape is a Buckler, which is barely technically a shield it is so small. Not to mention Patala has no troops outside of it's blessed Naga Warriors who can take on a squad of Man's knights. Against Man aren't bows totally useless anyway? I didn't spot any crossbow monkeys in the screenshot but you mention them, do Patala get them in LA? Edit: Doh, I see it now, it's Man that has the crossbows! Phrosphor fucked around with this message at 01:23 on Nov 4, 2016 |
# ? Nov 3, 2016 23:19 |
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Short bows is what was written, not crossbows. Patala can throw out large numbers of monkeys with shortbows, which generally don't do anything useful against the higher values of armor in the Late Age.
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# ? Nov 4, 2016 01:21 |
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Vauron posted:Short bows is what was written, not crossbows. Patala can throw out large numbers of monkeys with shortbows, which generally don't do anything useful against the higher values of armor in the Late Age. In this gimmick game however, we can have sometimes absurd numbers of troops on the field and when you pin down hundreds of units with hundreds of units into a giant melee, your hundreds of bow men/apes/things can do an astonishingly amount of damage. Especially if you are fighting someone who has been duped into throwing large amounts of expensive cavalry around because we have all the money now -but no archers to fire on your archers, so they just sit there unmolested, pumping out one huge cloud of arrows after another. But yeah, that short time spend basking in glory ends as soon as enough poo poo hits the archers to make them rout, or if magic poo poo like darkness and mist happens. But eh, we're still in the early phase here. Still, if you send up shortbows against real archers, you better have spend some thought on preventing them from just getting hit by 1000+ arrows into their stupid faces and routing immediately. You will see this in the future (if howareu remembers to continue posting my videos), when my bad flying archers actually meet some real archers and get dunked on. And then you'll see some battles where that doesn't happen because it's kind of hard to outrange flying archers if they're properly scripted...
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# ? Nov 4, 2016 02:03 |
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Libluini posted:In this gimmick game however, we can have sometimes absurd numbers of troops on the field and when you pin down hundreds of units with hundreds of units into a giant melee, your hundreds of bow men/apes/things can do an astonishingly amount of damage. Does Dom4 have the same
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# ? Nov 4, 2016 02:25 |
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Phrosphor posted:Does Dom4 have the same https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLyWKkAZn2w
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# ? Nov 4, 2016 02:39 |
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Dom 4's sound engine is another fascinating piece of the game's bizarre codebase. It addresses a simple problem in a very straightforward way...and deafens the user because it isn't very concerned with whether the resulting output is just a massive storm of amplified noise. It's like outsider art, and I kind of love it for that.
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# ? Nov 4, 2016 04:36 |
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Out of idle curiosity, what has Ragha been doing so far, if any of the players commenting in this thread have run into them at this point in the game? From experience they tend to be monstrously powerful with large money/resource boosts due to their primary limiting factor normally being just how expensive their units and temples are. Decent sized groups of N9(+some other minor/major bless) Zhayedan basically murder everything ever this early in the game, and their non-sacred recruitable cavalry - Saravan Guard with their 20 prot, shields, lances and composite bows - are hardly slouches either.
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# ? Nov 4, 2016 06:20 |
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since the topic of Dominion score is relevant right now, what's generally considered a good / safe score to take for your pretender? Is it that How R U's score is legitimately low for a Pretender, or normally would be okay and he just the great luck of being right next to a domkiller neighbor?
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# ? Nov 4, 2016 06:40 |
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As pointed out by how r u when he introduced his god, a Dominion score of 6 is pretty bad AND he had the misfortune of being next to someone who can push for a faster than normal domkill.
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# ? Nov 4, 2016 14:23 |
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Yeah, Dominion scales from 1 to 10, and 6 is generally considered the lowest acceptable amount; any lower than that and you're at risk of any old schmuck realizing what you're playing at and sending in a bunch of stealthy heretics or something to Domkill you even if they can't just mass blood sacrifices. As was pointed out earlier, it apparently used to be even worse when Temple Checks were just a flat %10 times your Domscore chance of succeeding, meaning that with less than 5 Domscore you were at risk of just blipping out of Godhood even if no one was doing anything to you because your Temple Checks succeeded less than half the time. That is, it seems, no longer quite the case, but THE META still encourages at least 6 Domscore since that's what most other people will be taking as well. There's probably some slightly reasonable strategy involving lower Domscore, but it would have to be massively surefire and require a very exacting nation and pretender build, because lowering your Domscore under 6 is probably one of the worst trade-offs in power versus build points that you can take at the start, aside maybe taking the miracle Misfortune 3/Death 3/Drain 3 carousel.
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# ? Nov 4, 2016 15:43 |
ousire posted:since the topic of Dominion score is relevant right now, what's generally considered a good / safe score to take for your pretender? Is it that How R U's score is legitimately low for a Pretender, or normally would be okay and he just the great luck of being right next to a domkiller neighbor?
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# ? Nov 4, 2016 16:27 |
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Are there any viable strategies that revolve around taking awful scales and then spreading them to your opponents' provinces too?
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# ? Nov 4, 2016 16:28 |
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Lord Koth posted:Out of idle curiosity, what has Ragha been doing so far, if any of the players commenting in this thread have run into them at this point in the game? From experience they tend to be monstrously powerful with large money/resource boosts due to their primary limiting factor normally being just how expensive their units and temples are. We have no scouting on Ragha so we're in the dark, but I can tell you that I am very unenthused at the thought of bumping into them in the future. Did you play Ragha in the first Mo Money game? I can't remember who was playing them. They are indeed massively OP and hosed up bullshit strong with Mo Money game settings. I can state right now that, other than imminent dom-death, Ragha is the single thing in this game that I'm most afraid of. As for Dominion score, taking 6 is, as others have said, pretty much the lowest you'd want to take without loving yourself. A score of 6, under normal circumstances, means that your weak Dominion will hardly ever be pushing into your neighbors' provinces, and in fact you'll likely have small amounts of their Dominion seeping into yours.
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# ? Nov 4, 2016 16:30 |
Spoggerific posted:Are there any viable strategies that revolve around taking awful scales and then spreading them to your opponents' provinces too?
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# ? Nov 4, 2016 16:35 |
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Spoggerific posted:Are there any viable strategies that revolve around taking awful scales and then spreading them to your opponents' provinces too? There are a couple, and there were a couple more in Dom3. I don't recall the exact details of the builds, but LA R'lyeh has an insanity effect attached to its dominion (which I THINK most of its own units have some resistance to), and in Dom3 LA Ermor had a freespawn mechanic that generated units within its dominion. This meant there was powerful synergy in making your Dominion both as strong and as miserable to everyone else as possible. R'lyeh can attach temperature and production maluses to their Dominion, since they're an underwater magic-heavy nation and so are less affected by those things. LA Ermor, on the other hand, could go whole hog and make their dominion as miserable as possible. Death 3 in particular was popular as it generates more corpses for the necromancy that cares about such things, and it salted the earth by destroying the populations and supply capacity of Ermor-adjacent regions, while Ermor cared about neither money nor supply. LA games would become a flowchart of 'Does Ermor exist? If yes, can we organize an effective coalition to kill them without backstabbing each other? If yes, who managed to sit out the war and DIDN'T have their population and supplies eradicated? That person wins'. LA Ermor was a kingmaker in any game it didn't win. I don't think LA Ermor exists anymore. The major issue with having Dominion that's miserable to be in is that you're the player most affected by it. If your nation doesn't have an innate resistance to whatever makes your Dominion unpleasant, then it's not going to be a very good strategy, because it won't give you much of an edge over your neighbors who are also suffering from it. In Dom3, LA Ermor actually benefited from having terrible, unlivable Dominion scales, and it wasn't a very fun or fair thing to be going up against. The remaining examples are, as far as I know, all much milder. Man variants can get away with powerful Drain and Cold scales, some nations can take heat scales and fatigue their neighbors a little, some nations don't care much about supply or money and can take sloth or death scales. LA R'lyeh has resistance to its own madness effect, I believe, and so there's that, but it also comes with the double-edged sword of playing a water nation in the first place.
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# ? Nov 4, 2016 16:48 |
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Shady Amish Terror posted:I don't think LA Ermor exists anymore. Isn't MA Ermor what LA Ermor used to be? New LA Ermor has a different name and supposedly their freespawn is garbage, and their dominion is no longer pure poison.
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# ? Nov 4, 2016 20:26 |
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Lemuria? It's not as bad, but it's pretty bad.
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# ? Nov 4, 2016 21:31 |
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Pretty sure Lemuria's dominion is just as bad as MA Ermor, it's just that Ermor also actually has a fairly good army, both in their chaff and sacreds. Lemuria... doesn't. At least not to the same extent.
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# ? Nov 4, 2016 21:44 |
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I think it's slower acting, so you've got a chance of recovering the territory before it's got a population in the double digits. edit - Haven't looked at it in forever though.
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# ? Nov 4, 2016 21:45 |
MA C'tis has a dominion that can cause non-cold-blooded units to get diseases. It's a good one to push. It is pretty funny when you get some good indie mages like sages and start to slowly kill them all too. Well 'funny'. You have to see the humor in the situation at least.
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# ? Nov 4, 2016 23:58 |
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Ramc posted:MA C'tis has a dominion that can cause non-cold-blooded units to get diseases. It's a good one to push. It also decreases enemy income and boosts yours for every dominion point, but it can be a double edged sword if you try to push it too agresively because you can give someone an excuse to form a coalition against you.
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# ? Nov 5, 2016 00:30 |
Angry Lobster posted:It also decreases enemy income and boosts yours for every dominion point, but it can be a double edged sword if you try to push it too agresively because you can give someone an excuse to form a coalition against you. True that. Basically tanking your own scales with the 'clever' idea to spread that to neighbors isn't so hot without one of these additional meta reasons. I am playing a game as MA Ulm with fantastic scales and when my dom extends into neighbors I feel like they owe me for the favor
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# ? Nov 5, 2016 01:23 |
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goatface posted:I think it's slower acting, so you've got a chance of recovering the territory before it's got a population in the double digits. Death dominion like Lemuria's can be amplified or slowed down by scales. In a test game I took death 3 for my Lemuria-pretender and my dominion killed my population ludicrously fast. I'm guessing since your troops are rather bad, the only good way to play Lemuria is to pile on the negative scales and just go full on world loving mode.
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# ? Nov 5, 2016 14:20 |
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Turn 23 Turn 23 begins with hitting research goals. We’ve completed level 3 in Thaumaturgy and level 2 in Conjuration. We set three of our N2 Abba mages to cast Haruspex, the Nature remote site-searching spell. [We found a magic site in Blackdale, but apparently it wasn't very impressive because I didn't record what it was, probably a +1N or +1S site.] If there are high-level nature sites in our territory, we are going to find them. We put all of our research points into Conjuration so we can get to Conj 3, where we’ll be able to use the Death remote site-searching spell: Dark Knowledge. Next there’s a Throne announcement, and it appears that Xibalba has claimed the Throne of the Elements: It is a really good throne that gives a great number of gems and has an Evocation discount. All Evocation spells cast from the province this throne is in get a 20% discount. Evocation is not the greatest spell school to have a discount for, but it can be supremely useful in certain circumstances. I’d really love to have that Throne. We have a bunch of scouted battle reports of which several are tit-for-tat moves between Patala and Mannish doomstacks, one of which is Bogarus killing those Earth-friend independents who stole his province the other turn The last two reports are of interest to us in that they show Pangaea attacking Xibalba. We officially have a war on! Here is one of Pangaea's armies stomping Xibalban province defense: The Centaur Cataphract is like a knight but better in every way with more Hit Points and better combat stats. The Recuperation ability (which IIRC every single Pangaean unit has) allows them to gain a lot of combat XP while avoiding picking up all of the afflictions that most veteran troops wrack up over time. The Stymphalian Bird doesn’t look impressive initially because it is just an armored Harpy, though one with 3 attacks. However, that first attack is a single-use AOE 1 ability. Cheap, armored, flying, and with AOE attacks; Stymphalian Birds have the opportunity to jump behind your lines on the first turn and potentially gently caress up a lot of vulnerable archers or mages. We next see a bunch of reports of our patrolling troops catching and killing scouts from various nations hiding in our territory. This is normal and no cause for alarm, but it’s always nice to kill other people’s scouts. Bad intel means you have a better chance of convincing somebody to do what you want them to do. The last report is of our scout being killed by a Xibalba army in one of our border provinces. However, this report also shows that there are 8 Xibalban Wayob mages in the army. Wayob are blood mages, and this is a blood hunting force. I look forward to killing them all. Blood hunting bats are the backbone of the Xibalban nations in every Era. Finally we’ll take a look at our dom score graph: We can see that while we didn’t maintain the dominion growth that we had the turn before we have at least managed to maintain that gain. This turn two additional Kohen Gadol will lend their H3 priestly power to the blood sac effort. With Xibalba now having to pivot to face an invasion I am hoping to regain the dominion that he has so rudely taken from us. e: Editing this into the Turn post. Here is a map roughly approximating the state of our corner of the world at this time: How are u fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Nov 7, 2016 |
# ? Nov 7, 2016 01:24 |
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Is Xibalba a stock Dom 4 nation? Are they basically an evil Caelum? I don't play the game, but love following along with these LPs. There was a good wiki for Dom 3 so I could read up to my heart's content; with Dom 4, not so much
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 09:14 |
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Any chance of a zoomed-out map with the borders painted in? Just to get an impression of who's where, I lose track a bit sometimes.
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 10:22 |
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Xibalba is one of the newer nations in Dom 4 and It's unrelated to Caelum beyond them both having a lot of flyers. Xibalba is a nation of Mayan bat people who are heavy into blood/nature/fire magics and eventually merge with the Atlanteans in the middle age and beyond.
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 11:04 |
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# ? May 2, 2024 23:15 |
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PurpleXVI posted:Any chance of a zoomed-out map with the borders painted in? Just to get an impression of who's where, I lose track a bit sometimes. I'm doing all of this with screen shots and in Paint, and I have no idea how to do fancy photo stuff so here you go. A rough approximation of the world right now: e: the Grey provinces with an Orange dot are unclaimed Thrones, the ones with the extremely powerful defenders. How are u fucked around with this message at 17:15 on Nov 7, 2016 |
# ? Nov 7, 2016 16:25 |