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To make it easier for How Are U to combine both our LPs, here's what happened during the last turns from my point of view: Caelum Turn 21 Caelum Turn 22 The next video after that last one corresponds to turn 24 since I forgot to record 23, so I'll wait until turn 24 is posted before posting the next video link. Or you could watch it right now and ruin your surprise Edit: Be warned though sometimes YouTube is lovely and for some reason gives you my videos at a lower resolution than they should have. If the screen looks blurry, you can rectify that by clicking on settings and put the video on 720p, the resolution I recorded with. That should make everything look nice and clear. Libluini fucked around with this message at 17:14 on Nov 7, 2016 |
# ? Nov 7, 2016 17:11 |
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# ? May 9, 2024 22:52 |
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Xibalba are cool because they're insane bats who want to steal the sun.
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 20:47 |
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Do they get the Hero Twins as unique leaders?
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# ? Nov 7, 2016 21:43 |
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Turn 24 The turn begins with a message indicating that we have hit Conjuration 3, which gives us access to the Death remote site-search spell Dark Knowledge. I immediately set two Geddeoni mages to cast it each month. Next we see that two of our Haruspex casters found sites! Which turn out to be utter poo poo: What a loving let-down. I am feeling a little bummed about the magic sites we’ve discovered so far. No gems, and now I have a site that lets me recruit cavemen from a province that already let me recruit cavemen. Swell! On top of that none of our band of roving site-searching mages found anything either, so this turn was a wash. Fingers crossed for next turn. We refocus our magic research on the school of Evocation, where another remote searching spell, Arcane Probing, waits at level 3. There are several scouted battle reports we get to see this turn. The first is of Patala attacking a Mannish army: Did not go well for the apes. Simply put; Man’s crossbows and longbows devastate the poorly armored ape infantry and archers. Patala is likely toast. Then we see a Pangaea army devastate a Xibalban force: And then another Pangaea army smash a Xiba- What? That can’t be right. Pan lost this battle?! Looks like Pan got unlucky and failed a moral check, routing from a battle that was closer than I expected but Pan should have won. Well, I don’t mind, I am happy to see Pan stumble a little in their effort. The more Pan and Xibalba beat themselves against each other the stronger we will end up in comparison. Speaking of strength, our Dom-score continues to drop, even with two additional Holy 3 blood sacrificers contributing. I am really hoping that this new war forces Xibalba to stop his own saccing. At minimum, the war is going to destroy a bunch of his temples and weaken his Dom strength. We will shortly be joining the war! Next turn we'll have enough troops in Range of Light to feel comfortable crossing the border into the Xibalban province of Urd. Look at all of those happy Levite Zealots and crossbowmen: Our other armies continue to slowly trudge toward the Xibalban border. I discover that crossbowmen and our Asherite soldiers have a map-move of 1, which is as slow as it gets and is really hampering our ability to join in on the action. Next turn: more site searching, more scout reports, and we finally launch an invasion!
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# ? Nov 11, 2016 00:43 |
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Man, yeah, those temples on your borders need to DIE. Are there any spells that target enemy temples for destruction, specifically?
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# ? Nov 11, 2016 00:46 |
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This Dom situation is really scary, I hate to think what the factions that can't blood sac are thinking right now.
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# ? Nov 11, 2016 00:50 |
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PurpleXVI posted:Man, yeah, those temples on your borders need to DIE. There aren't any spells that directly destroy Temples as far as I am aware. If they existed I suspect they would be terribly difficult to balance (as much as Dominions is a balanced game in any regard), because if the spell was too cheap to cast or too low in research level it would be spammed to devastating effect. Also, the type of magic required for the spell (Astral, Death, Nature, Earth, Air, Water, Fire, or Blood) would suddenly become incredibly more powerful. Yeah this Dom-pushing is awful. Take a look at how many Black Candles are in our territory in the last screen shot! I think it is becoming pretty apparent that Xibalba's strategy for the game was to expand like mad and then Blood Sacrifice like a motherfucker, overwhelming his neighbors before they realized what was happening. The thing is; it's working.
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# ? Nov 11, 2016 01:14 |
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How are u posted:There aren't any spells that directly destroy Temples as far as I am aware. Is there not a spell that causes the earthquake event in a province? I am sure I remember reading about it in the past. Someone started having a lot of earthquake events trigger and originally thought it was a Chaos scale Dom pushing them but when it started hitting their cap they realised it was an attack. May have been a mod a spell in Dom3.
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# ? Nov 11, 2016 01:47 |
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Phrosphor posted:Is there not a spell that causes the earthquake event in a province? I am sure I remember reading about it in the past. Not as far as I know. Earthquakes that destroy Temples are entirely random events.
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# ? Nov 11, 2016 16:20 |
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I think there's an absurdly over-priced blood spell that does candle damage to a target province.
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# ? Nov 11, 2016 21:18 |
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There's also Melancholia, a seldom-used Earth-spell which has a chance to reduce enemy dominion as one of its effects.
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# ? Nov 11, 2016 21:49 |
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Nah, aside from summoning in a bunch of large demonic locusts with Heretic, it doesn't look like Blood has any means via spells to reduce candles. They're not stealthy and it's not a particularly good attack spell either as they're pretty lovely units. It does cost 88 slaves though, so maybe that's what you're thinking of? Alternatively, you might be thinking of Enchanted Forests - which is up at Conj 9 and 90 N gems.
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# ? Nov 11, 2016 22:36 |
Lord Koth posted:Nah, aside from summoning in a bunch of large demonic locusts with Heretic, it doesn't look like Blood has any means via spells to reduce candles. They're not stealthy and it's not a particularly good attack spell either as they're pretty lovely units. It does cost 88 slaves though, so maybe that's what you're thinking of? Oh bonus because of how it works it makes one leader locust with a bunch of unit locust and guess what the heretic flag that lowers candles ~doesn't work if you are a unit~. A vampire lord costs 77 slaves in contrast.
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# ? Nov 11, 2016 23:53 |
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Turn 25 The turn begins with advances made in Evocation research. We will hit Evocation 3 next turn and start remote-searching for Astral sites. We see that Ragha has taken a Throne, the Throne of the Sun: It's a very good Throne, I’d love to have it. It has good scales, good gem income, and excellent Dominion spread. Ragha is a terrifyingly strong nation in general, so of course he gets such a great Throne. Such is life! Our remote site-searching found one site: Not great, not terrible, extra Nature gems are always welcome, and we'll want Earth gems in the future. Our scouts bring us a few battle reports from far away, the first of which is what looks to be Patala’s last stand in the province of Nethermark: The ape army is numerous, but so too are the Knights and longbows of Man. Volleys of longbow arrows and crossbow bolts tear through lightly armored Patalan archers. Even War Elephants can’t stand up to heavily massed archers. The little red numbers are where a handful of War Elephants used to be. Too little, too late. The battle quickly becomes a Patalan rout, and what I can only imagine to be the largest Patalan army in the field is soon broken. Other reports are uninteresting, more of Man taking lightly defended Patala provinces or of Pangaea taking the same from Xibalba. However, there is an interesting report of Pangaea attempting to storm a Xibalban Palisade fort: That’s a lot of dead Pangaen troops, far more than I’d ever expect considering the weak defense. Let’s take a look at the battle: Yeah, very strong Pan force. Tough Centaur and also a bunch of Pan’s cap-only Dryad Hoplites, sacred heavy infantry all of which have the Awe ability, which makes enemy units pass a moral check before they can hit the Dryad Hoplite in combat. They are probably one of the better line-holding infantry units in the game. Pan’s forces massacre the Xibalban bats that fly out to meet them: Ah what is this? The bat mages are forming a blood communion! Communions are magical, battlefield "networks" in which certain mages become ‘Slaves’ and others become ‘Masters’. The Masters get boosted magical power while the Slaves sit dormant for the entire battle. The Masters also get to pass on all spell fatigue onto the Slaves. Communions are powerful, difficult to execute perfectly, and very easy to mess-up. If you have too many Masters passing too much Fatigue onto the Slaves you can push the Slaves over the 200 Fatigue threshold after which they start to take damage. Players will often end up with dozens of dead Communion Slaves after a big battle or a scripting error. Normal Communions require Astral magic to create, but Blood mages can join a Communion by sacrificing a blood slave. Xibalba has created a Communion here, and I think I know what he plans to do with it... Yep, Xibalba scripted his Masters to cast Hell Power. Hell Power is a very dangerous Blood battlefield spell. The caster gets +2(!) to magic paths but is also horror marked, and horrors periodically appear during the battle. It is almost always a death sentence, but what Xibalba is doing is using it as a final act of revenge against Pangaea. Horrors are nasty loving business, having great stats, huge amounts of Fear, life-draining attacks, ethereal, and the ability to teleport around the battlefield at will. Horrors are impossible* to control by the player, they do what they want. They’ll usually attack the units with the most horror marks, but they are ultimately equal opportunity murderers. They also stay on the battlefield until either they die or everything else is dead. The horrors that Xibalba summons in his last stand in this palisade quickly kill every last bat mage before moving onto the Pangaean forces. The rout the otherwise victorious Pan army and inflict substantial casualties while doing it. Observe Pangaea's troops fleeing in the background. The Centaur Cataphracts are trapped by the Horrors and ripped to pieces. Well, I am really glad that I got to see the Hell Power Communion before it was used on me, and I am sure it will be used on me before this is over. Let’s check our Dominion graph for this turn: OK, great, small uptick. That should only get better from here on out. We are moving our first great army across the border and into the Xibalban province of Urd. Fingers crossed that things go as planned. Next turn: War! Addendum: I spoke with Pangaea after I finished this turn and he indicated to me that he only had 4 candles of dominion left. He’s been hit even harder than I have by the bats’ awful blood sacrificing. It is very possible that he might die soon, leaving us alone to deal with the bats. That is some hosed up poo poo! How are u fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Nov 14, 2016 |
# ? Nov 14, 2016 22:40 |
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The good ol' Hell Power shenanigans communion, had a great deal of fun doing that in Dom 3, specially with vampire lords. It turns ou that if you script a big blob of flying units to bodyguard your mages, the horrors have a really hard time getting to them because there is literally no space for the horrors to fly into melee.
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# ? Nov 14, 2016 22:49 |
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I, on the other hand, didn't notice my dominion near Xibalba going down until my neighbours told me about it. Which is why I was very torn about my NAP with the batmen afterwards.
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# ? Nov 14, 2016 23:08 |
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What's with the asterisk by "impossible"?
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# ? Nov 14, 2016 23:12 |
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Glitches. Dominions is really well coded.
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# ? Nov 14, 2016 23:14 |
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Well, glitches and maybe...three edge cases that are probably intentional? Depends on what's been changed between Dom 3 and Dom 4, what you mean by 'control', and in one case what you define as an astral horror, if I recall the unit viewer info and associated spells correctly. There are ways to get your hands on Astral Horrors, is the short answer, but I don't know if it's a particularly good idea as I'm not aware of how well the specifics work out.
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# ? Nov 14, 2016 23:21 |
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Heh, Hell Power communion. To elaborate on How are u's description, what actually makes it so nasty is that communion masters proliferate all personal target spells onto all the slaves too. Usually it's going to be things like boosted fatigue reduction and regeneration, but in this case Hell Power happens to be a personal spell as well. So instead of just the master having a chance per turn of drawing a horror, the bats ended up with 9 chances per turn, until some started dying, with each having a chance of drawing in a Horror. As for Ragha, Throne of the Sun is a good throne overall, but depending on his scales it may very well inconvenience him as well. Ragha has a weird mechanic where they have temperature sensitive recruits (3 hot mages & a hot sacred, 3 cold mages & a cold sacred) that are only recruitable dependent on the temperature of the province you're recruiting them in. Temperature changes naturally over the year dependent on the seasons, but the Hot/Cold scales of your pretender influence this. Generally Ragha is going to go with a slight H preference, because their H sacreds are REALLY loving GOOD, and the C sacreds really aren't that great, but C does get the arguably better mages (H still gets good mages, the C mage selections are just really good). So H1 will shift the temperature bands so that their H units are recruitable for more of the year, while still leaving a small gap in winter for recruiting C mages. The Throne of the Sun increases his H scale, which may very well lock him from never getting a C province within his candles without usage of spells to tweak it. The other thing that makes the Throne of the Sun not quite as valuable to them as others, and something that contributes to the above issue, is that Ragha really wants to build temples if they can. Ragha's temples cost DOUBLE what most other nations' temples do, but that's because they also produce F gems (capping at I believe 10 additional F gem income), so while the throne has good F income, Ragha already has a really good source of that gem. The extra cost is generally not an issue in Mo Money games, so the encouragement to build temples also means their Dominion gets pushed stronger, meaning they push their now (likely) H2 scales into their provinces significantly faster, possibly making it hard to even keep forts on the edge of your nation still producing C units for long.
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# ? Nov 14, 2016 23:26 |
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I love horrors and people who have a "If I can't can't have the world no-one can!" philosophy.
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# ? Nov 15, 2016 00:34 |
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It also warrants reiterating that horrors are nasty, NASTY business. If the fact that a handful of them decimated both of those armies wasn't clear indication enough, keep in mind that once horror-spamming starts in a game, it can take a while to fully run its course, if it even ever does, because the survivors of horror attacks usually gain the 'Horror Mark' affliction, which will cause horrors to periodically spawn to kill them until they succeed. This is ESPECIALLY nasty if you're relying heavily on your Pretender or some other super-unit, because even if they're strong enough to beat up lesser Horrors any successful attacks they make will probably just make the unit's Horror Mark affliction worse...and there are larger horrors out there. Much, much, MUCH larger horrors, statistically superior to any non-unique unit in the game. And they will keep spawning on Horror-marked units and will keep attacking them until they succeed in killing them. Also, barring any weird edge cases, Horror Marks are permanent. A unit that is Horror Marked is, eventually, doomed, though it may take a while before they're Horror Marked badly enough for it to be a problem if they're fairly strong. Horror Marks can't be removed by traditional healing, shapeshifting, or even revival from death.
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# ? Nov 15, 2016 01:01 |
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In one game I had my pretender getting multiple horror marks, and that stubborn gently caress killed and killed one horror after another. Of course gaining even more marks in the process, while also getting more and more crippled over time. When a horror finally dumpstered my poor magic snake, I called him back. He came back with an incredible mountain of both crippling wounds and horror marks. He then got attacked by horrors literally every turn and after surviving and killing some more horrors, he was brought down a second time. At that point I decided to go the (very short) rest of the game without dragging that poor bastard back into the land of the living.
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# ? Nov 16, 2016 01:41 |
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Yeah, from what little I know of Dominions, "horror-marking your Pretender God" is basically one of the game's premiere gently caress yous. Right up there with killing them with a turkey.
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# ? Nov 16, 2016 01:45 |
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Yeah, from what little I know of Dominions, "horror-marking your Pretender God" is basically one of the game's premiere gently caress yous. Also always nice is the rare classic "getting hit with a sharp stick and bleeding out in your first battle". I've never seen a huge monster dying like a chump like that before and after. Since then I'm always a bit anxious when using awake pretenders.
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# ? Nov 16, 2016 01:53 |
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Horror-spite seems like an excellent way to go out. i mean, if your goal is to give up your land as expensively as possible.
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# ? Nov 16, 2016 02:00 |
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Libluini posted:Also always nice is the rare classic "getting hit with a sharp stick and bleeding out in your first battle". I've never seen a huge monster dying like a chump like that before and after. Wait, I think I missed this story!
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# ? Nov 16, 2016 02:00 |
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Is there any list of the horrors? The wikis I have found are all super bad.
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# ? Nov 16, 2016 04:24 |
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There's a handy digital mod inspector here: https://larzm42.github.io/dom4inspector/ That contains most of the moddable elements like spells and units. To find horrors, you can click the Units tab on the left, and then the Type column on the right to organize critters by type; horrors have their own category. In particular, keep an eye out for 'Doom Horror' in the descriptions when you mouse over them; horrors described as such are the biggest of the big and the baddest of the bad.
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# ? Nov 16, 2016 04:27 |
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Shady Amish Terror posted:There's a handy digital mod inspector here: https://larzm42.github.io/dom4inspector/ Nice, thanks. "Doom Horrors" are mostly what I was looking for because I remember some of them being crazy as hell.
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# ? Nov 16, 2016 04:51 |
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:Wait, I think I missed this story! I was dumb once and used a Raven pumped up on death (and therefore fear) as an awake pretender. In his first battle he first got hit by a tiny projectile from a bunch of indeps and started bleeding, then the army panicked and ran away. My victorious pretender got a tiny scratch and something called "bleeding". He started to lose tiny amounts of HP constantly. Cue my surprise when the battle ended and the game calculated like a thousand turns of bleeding. Apperently bleeding works like poison in that way? Anyway, my pretender lost tons of HP in a couple seconds and died. Later the same thing happened to me with an awakened titan in a test game: Tiny scratch in one of the first battles, got bleeding, died at the end of battle.
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# ? Nov 16, 2016 11:50 |
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So what happens to Pangaea's lands if he gets domkilled? Do they go to the bat guys or are they suddenly unoccupied and everyone is scrambling to take a piece? I've never played a dominions game, so these LPs are really interesting to me.
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# ? Nov 16, 2016 17:49 |
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Libluini posted:I was dumb once and used a Raven pumped up on death (and therefore fear) as an awake pretender. In his first battle he first got hit by a tiny projectile from a bunch of indeps and started bleeding, then the army panicked and ran away. My victorious pretender got a tiny scratch and something called "bleeding". He started to lose tiny amounts of HP constantly. Cue my surprise when the battle ended and the game calculated like a thousand turns of bleeding. That's... impressive! The odds on that sort of thing have got to be pretty low, don't they? Grizzwold posted:So what happens to Pangaea's lands if he gets domkilled? Do they go to the bat guys or are they suddenly unoccupied and everyone is scrambling to take a piece? I have also never played a Dominions game, but I've read some LPs; IIRC the result of a player dying is that any provinces that are still "theirs" become unowned independent provinces again. When a player dies because they got attacked to death, that's usually not an issue, but a domkill can potentially mean a suddenly-gaping mass of indep provinces where everyone scrambles to rush in and grab everything they can. The dead player's armies are still there, but now they're AI-controlled and thus significantly less difficult to steamroll, so the territory is usually all claimed in a few turns unless there were any serious doomstacks sitting around. People who actually know what they're talking about may correct me on any of the above.
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# ? Nov 16, 2016 18:10 |
The armies of a domkilled player disappear at the end of the turn they got domkilled on. You still need to siege down forts but they have no defenders to slow the process down.
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# ? Nov 16, 2016 18:34 |
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:That's... impressive! The odds on that sort of thing have got to be pretty low, don't they? Another important thing to mention is that player capital provinces are a huge boon and there would be a massive scramble to get that cap province.
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# ? Nov 16, 2016 23:32 |
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Turn 26 Turn 26 begins with a message indicating we have hit Evocation 3, which is great. I set four mages to cast the ‘Arcane Probing’ spell each month, we’ll soon find all of the Astral sites in our territory. Astral magic is probably my favorite type of magic. Astral is just so incredibly useful, a toolbox of spells that I find I sorely miss when playing a nation with poor Astral access. Hopefully we can find a lot of sites! Speaking of site-searching; we found 3 sites this turn: None of them ground-breaking but all of them welcome additions to our gem income. Our scouts bring us reports of a whole bunch of battles from around the world. Xibalba manages to put up a spirited resistance, but on the whole Pangaea is winning more battles and winning them pretty decisively. Our own siege of the Xibalban fort of Urd has gone well. We waltzed into the province and killed the PD, and because palisade forts are about as sturdy as wet paper bags we are ready to storm it next turn. I give the ‘storm fort’ orders and we will hope for the best. A mighty army, full of Righteousness and Zeal! We are moving reinforcements into Summerbay, soon we'll have two armies in the field. Pangaea has indicated that he will vacate the Copper Woods province next turn, leaving us a path up the coast towards Xibalba’s capitol province. I am glad that Pan isn’t dead just yet, but I am also glad that he is kind of on the line. Once again: the more damage that Pan and Xibalba do to each other the better for us! A random event that occurred in Range of Light gave us some goats: They're almost cute. Finally, we'll check our Dominion score graph again: Next turn: Storming a fort!
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# ? Nov 20, 2016 03:25 |
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Okay, the goat event is new to me. What a charmingly meaningless event.
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# ? Nov 20, 2016 03:34 |
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Awwww, goats. I'm kind of disappointed that they don't have any special, ridiculous powers or incredible niche uses where they're overpowered. Now how am I gonna kill an enemy Pretender with a goat?
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# ? Nov 20, 2016 04:10 |
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PurpleXVI posted:Awwww, goats. If you have goats, there is a chance of them attracting a dragon.
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# ? Nov 20, 2016 05:52 |
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# ? May 9, 2024 22:52 |
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I mean, if you're already winning, you could Gift of Reason, empower, and/or polymorph goats for funsies. You could.AfroSquirrel posted:If you have goats, there is a chance of them attracting a dragon. ...that would explain it.
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# ? Nov 20, 2016 06:00 |