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Looking forward to seeing what higher level spells and strategies Gath has to offer! I can't believe how micromanagement heavy Dominions is.
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Dec 1, 2016 03:01
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Apocron posted:Looking forward to seeing what higher level spells and strategies Gath has to offer! I can't believe how micromanagement heavy Dominions is. This is exactly my problem with the game. I love the first 15-20 turns when things are mostly straight forward and the micro isn't too bad. Turns 20-30 start to wear me out a little bit, and I stop being as interested in the game. After Turn 30 all I really want to do is kit out commanders in cool gear to make thugs.
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Dec 1, 2016 03:51
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Apocron posted:Looking forward to seeing what higher level spells and strategies Gath has to offer! I can't believe how micromanagement heavy Dominions is. You ain't seen nothin yet 
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Dec 1, 2016 04:06
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Communions ho? Where poo poo can end up a creek in a hurry for either side of the battle. At least thats my impression of them from watching the LPs, when they work they do terrible things to opposing armies but the moment there is a hickup in the order which spells are cast the whole thing can collapse like a house of cards.
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Dec 1, 2016 10:38
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Wait when did Xibalba go AI?
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Dec 1, 2016 15:14
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Deadmeat5150 posted:Wait when did Xibalba go AI? Pretty drat fast after that double-invasion got rolling,
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Dec 1, 2016 16:02
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Deadmeat5150 posted:Wait when did Xibalba go AI? Turn 29, perhaps a turn earlier. Turn 29 is when I noticed it and noted it down. And yeah, it's pretty normal to want to go AI when you get ganged-on hard like Xibalba has been. It happens to everybody at some point or another, so the real question is what you choose to do about it. Bleed your enemies to the fullest extent and fight like hell for every last inch, or throw in the towel, recognizing that sometimes the only way to win is not to play. The choice is yours! How are u fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Dec 1, 2016 |
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Dec 1, 2016 19:53
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Are there any sort of "gently caress you, you're coming down with me" spells or abilities? I know horror marks and how they can spread were discussed earlier, but it seems pretty easy to just quarantine. Basically, is there some (presumably late-game) spell that you can cast as a sort of "well if I can't win neither can you" button that just screws over the whole world (or large portions of it)?
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Dec 1, 2016 20:01
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Oh yes, its just almost impossible for Xilbaba to be able to cast them at this point. For instance, if you use the Wish spell and ask for Genocide a third of the world's population will die off, and each unit in the game has a chance to be attacked. Sure, the attack doesn't have enough damage to threaten a giant or a dragon, but lots of powerful mages are old dudes with low max hp. Or, to use an option that fits better with a blood nation, Astral Corruption causes there to be a chance of being attacked by a Horror every time mages cast a non-blood ritual or forge an item. Sure, cheap and low end spells like the site-searching ones mean you'd get weak horrors, but if you want to use the big and mighty spells/items you'd better accept the very real chance of something a Doom Horror. Edit: Its worth noting that the above happens to everyone on the map.
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Dec 1, 2016 20:30
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How are u posted:Turn 29, perhaps a turn earlier. Turn 29 is when I noticed it and noted it down. But if you consistently go AI as soon as you have a serious setback, you're encouraging the other people you play with frequently to attack you, knowing that you'll usually fold. The meta-game thing to do is to be as consistently obstinate and annoying as possible as an enemy, but consistently faithful as a friend. This makes the other players think twice whenever they decide to target you. That said... it's pretty hard to dedicate an hour of your time every night to taking your turn in a game where your defeat is certain. So it's really understandable.
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Dec 1, 2016 20:38
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Wishing for Armageddon is the better of those two options if you're just trying to drag everyone else down with you. Astral Corruption is more to gently caress over non-blood nations and give you the advantage in general - which may not be terribly useful if they're already stomping you into the ground. On the other hand, blowing up the population of the entire world, and thus dropping income into the gutter, is going to affect the rest of the game whether you survive or not.
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Dec 1, 2016 20:45
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Crazycryodude posted:Are there any sort of "gently caress you, you're coming down with me" spells or abilities? I know horror marks and how they can spread were discussed earlier, but it seems pretty easy to just quarantine. Basically, is there some (presumably late-game) spell that you can cast as a sort of "well if I can't win neither can you" button that just screws over the whole world (or large portions of it)? Isn't there a spell you can cast to make every character grow old and die or something.
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Dec 1, 2016 20:54
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Burden of Time, but that goes down when the caster dies or somebody overwrites it as a global spell.
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Dec 1, 2016 20:57
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Ardeem posted:Burden of Time, but that goes down when the caster dies or somebody overwrites it as a global spell. It also doesn't work if your enemies use undead, demons or elves against you If you're a death nation somehow losing against, I don't know, Man or something, then it works fairly well as an annoyance, though
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Dec 1, 2016 22:27
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Lord Koth posted:Wishing for Armageddon is the better of those two options if you're just trying to drag everyone else down with you. Astral Corruption is more to gently caress over non-blood nations and give you the advantage in general - which may not be terribly useful if they're already stomping you into the ground. On the other hand, blowing up the population of the entire world, and thus dropping income into the gutter, is going to affect the rest of the game whether you survive or not. If you still have enough pearls to Wish, you weren't trying hard enough to win your war. And anyway the metagame tactic is most effective if "attack me and you, specifically the attacker, will suffer enough that you won't win" is far more effective than "attack me and everyone in the game will suffer." The former discourages an attacker: the latter encourages everyone to gang up and eliminate you as soon as possible.
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Dec 1, 2016 22:51
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Leperflesh posted:If you still have enough pearls to Wish, you weren't trying hard enough to win your war. Well it might not be optimal play, but I sure do love the idea of someone going Sour Grapes Genocide right before losing. Has anyone ever done that or something similar in a previous SA Dominions game?
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Dec 1, 2016 23:04
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the former requires a lot of individualized deterrence due to the specific threats posed by each power. the latter deters everyone to some extent. you're not wrong that it's better to bring the threat home personally, but having a nuclear threat active can buy you the time you need to get to the end game and complete whatever hare-brained scheme you had in mind, which also isn't bad.
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Dec 1, 2016 23:11
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Burden of Time is a year two target.
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Dec 1, 2016 23:23
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Leperflesh posted:And anyway the metagame tactic is most effective if "attack me and you, specifically the attacker, will suffer enough that you won't win" is far more effective than "attack me and everyone in the game will suffer." The former discourages an attacker: the latter encourages everyone to gang up and eliminate you as soon as possible. This. I still remember the LP where TheDemon had a terrible nation with terrible placement and terrible routes for expansion and terrible resources and went through something like thirty turns of nation after nation saying "Hey Lanka looks small and beatable, let's crush them for early war gains." To which his response was, essentially, "I am a stabbing robot made of knives and when you attack me I will stab you." He fought off army after army after army from something like three nations - and, IIRC, none of those three nations that kept throwing waves of soldiers to die against the wall of TheDemon ended up winning the game.
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Dec 1, 2016 23:28
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:This. It's where I learned about this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lBRf0UgjFc 
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Dec 1, 2016 23:35
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and the entire reason that worked was because TheDemon's nation, while terrible, had an outsized alpha strike for his size that none of the places looking to whack him were in a position to counter effectively. the reason his threat was effective was because his specific threat of really angry blessed demons was because the people who couldn't deal with that trivially early on were the ones surrounding him. certainly, an alliance could have knocked TheDemon out of the game very quickly, but he specifically said the first person to throw a punch was getting bled dry. the people surrounding him did not have very strong blessed troops or an appropriate supercombattant pretender to counter that strategy, so nobody wanted to throw that punch. it's not a general solution, is what i'm saying.
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Dec 2, 2016 00:04
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Coolguye posted:and the entire reason that worked was because TheDemon's nation, while terrible, had an outsized alpha strike for his size that none of the places looking to whack him were in a position to counter effectively. the reason his threat was effective was because his specific threat of really angry blessed demons was because the people who couldn't deal with that trivially early on were the ones surrounding him. certainly, an alliance could have knocked TheDemon out of the game very quickly, but he specifically said the first person to throw a punch was getting bled dry. the people surrounding him did not have very strong blessed troops or an appropriate supercombattant pretender to counter that strategy, so nobody wanted to throw that punch. Oh, it's certainly not a universal cure-all - even with Lanka's advantages the biggest factor to TheDemon hanging on as long as he did was the fact that he was really very good at battlefield scripting and using formations and moving his armies where his opponents were going to force battles on his terms - but it's still something to keep in mind, that sometimes your most effective way to avoid an early war before you're ready for it is simply the demonstrated ability to say "if you gently caress with me I will bleed you dry." Dominions' metagame is endlessly fascinating to me despite the fact that I have very little interest in actually playing the game.
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Dec 2, 2016 00:11
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I mean, there's other reasons to stick to the end. I remember a 4 player FFA game of Battle for Wesnoth I played... Half a decade ago, I think? I played the drake/lizard faction, the players to my side were loyalists (medieval humans), and across the map from me was a necromancer. Drakes are fairly vulnerable to loyalist units until they get some upgrades - I absolutely could not afford an early war on two fronts in those circumstances. So I made a deal with the guy on the south to not attack each-other for the moment, split the land between us 50-50, and focus on someone else instead. I was actually in a slightly worse position than him in this deal, but still in a better position than I would have been without the deal. We both left a pair of cheap units on the "border" to visually confirm that the other side is following the agreement, and that was it. Anyway, I manage to bait my enemy to the west into taking a fight in unfavorable circumstances, and I take out his most expensive units without significant losses on my part, even managing to get enough XP to get some nice upgrades on key units. After that, it was a slow battle of attrition I was guaranteed to win eventually, since I had twice the income and a larger and more experienced standing army, but it was by no means a blitzkrieg since he was putting up one hell of a fight. We taunted each-other a bit over public chat, poking fun at minor mistakes and (in his case) posturing about glorious last stands against the evil draconic menace. In all honesty, he was slightly outplaying me at that point since I was making dumb mistakes trying to beat him ASAP, but he just didn't have the force needed to exploit this. At around this point, the necromancer player went AI, which was really bad news for me for obvious reasons. I negotiated a quick truce with my enemy (from this point on referred to as "my buddy"), stopping my advance and leaving one contested point of interest to him. He moved on to exploit the AI to the south while I pulled back to reinforce my border. We actually kept taunting each-other just to keep the dude south off-guard. And what'd'ya know, an army shows up near my border guard with a "dog ate my homework" level of excuse for why they were there. I deployed my guys somewhat further back hoping that he was going to move his faster troops too far forward without backup to grab as much land as possible in the expectation that my army was on the other side of the map. He did just that, and actually had a meltdown accusing me of betraying him after his attack got crushed (his AI-mop-up army ran into my buddy's force on the same turn and had to fight instead of claiming all the juicy income there) Still, just like my buddy couldn't beat me because I had superior income, neither could I do more than just hold the line against the guy to the south. However, buddy was slowly (slooooowly) taking over the AI's former lands and pushing him back, reducing his income and forcing him to divert troops and give me a chance to actually start advancing too. Soon after I broke his lines, southy went AI, and me and buddy controlled half the map each, both with huge armies after a long slugfest, and we just called it shared win and ended the game there. In slightly different circumstances, we would have fought, and I likely would have won out in the end just because I did a better job of keeping my leveled up units alive. But while southy was fun to grind into dust since he was so ridiculously whiny about everything that went wrong, buddy put up a valiant effort that made our initial war fun, and was a critical part of my survival against southy later on - it felt wrong to deny him a win, especially since actually defeating him would have taken loving forever now. So, by putting up a fight even when it seemed like a lost cause, the dude to my west ended up sharing victory with me. Obviously, a de-facto 4X game like Dominions is much less forgiving of any sort of a disadvantage, and less likely to produce similar results, but it's not that unthinkable of a situation.
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Dec 2, 2016 00:55
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my dad posted:
The first time I won a game of Dominions 4 was in a game where I (MA Agartha) got rushed by LA Atlantis (all-ages game) and had my living-poo poo pushed in by his W9 Assartuts. By early Year 2 I had around 4 to 5 provinces total, and would have 100% been doomed to defeat if Atlantis hadn't gotten cocky and decided to invade another neighbor before bottling me up in my capitol. The small reduction in aggressive pressure allowed me the precious few turns to get the research I needed to summon up a couple dozen fire kids, which I then got lucky enough to use to kill his W9 Dragon in a defensive trap, which triggered him rage-quitting and going AI (JonJoe was notorious for this), which let me reclaim all of my land plus eat half of his kingdom, and 80+ turns later I won the game. Fighting to the end is always the best choice, even when you lose, unless of course you just get sick of playing Dominions 4 as a whole (understandable, the micro is rough).
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Dec 2, 2016 01:37
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about sticking it out
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DivineCoffeeBinge posted:This. Actually, Builds Character, the guy that suffered the most from The Demon actually did end up winning the game! With Hinnom.
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Dec 2, 2016 03:14
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I've only really read LP threads for Dominions, but I can't wait until the globals start going up. I love the flavor text for all of the 'A Dire Portent' messages.
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Dec 2, 2016 04:05
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Fearless_Decoy posted:I've only really read LP threads for Dominions, but I can't wait until the globals start going up. I love the flavor text for all of the 'A Dire Portent' messages. Is there a text dump somewhere with all of the Dire Portent flavor texts? I recall some of them being pretty badass sounding
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Dec 2, 2016 07:57
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Honestly, The Demon was a terrifingly skilled player that no one wanted to neighbour and Hinnom was OP as gently caress.
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Dec 3, 2016 00:00
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Angry Lobster posted:Honestly, The Demon was a terrifingly skilled player that no one wanted to neighbour and Hinnom was OP as gently caress. TheDemon played wonderfully for what he had. The only strategy he didn't try was gearing up a thug to take the adjacent water provinces to the lovely island he was stuck on, but given his terrible position he still survived to the end game.
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Dec 4, 2016 19:03
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Angry Lobster posted:Honestly, The Demon was a terrifingly skilled player that no one wanted to neighbour and Hinnom was OP as gently caress. When was the game though as Hinnom did get a decent nerf and from what I remember he took a slightly odd choice of pretender for them.
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Dec 5, 2016 00:27
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Hunt11 posted:When was the game though as Hinnom did get a decent nerf and from what I remember he took a slightly odd choice of pretender for them. Hipponomnom the Sphinx! What a great LP that was.
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Dec 5, 2016 01:00
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my dad posted:I mean, there's other reasons to stick to the end. In the newbie game I was in I was reduced down to my cap circle for a lot of the early game, but came back to win it after two of the people in the dogpile hosed off after I ate a cap siege stack and the third went AI for IRL reasons. Then I ate him. Then the world. It was good it is in
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Dec 6, 2016 03:43
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Ramc posted:In the newbie game I was in I was reduced down to my cap circle for a lot of the early game, but came back to win it after two of the people in the dogpile hosed off after I ate a cap siege stack and the third went AI for IRL reasons. Then I ate him. Then the world. It was good it is in I thought you were in this game and figured you had just won it until I reread the player list.
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Dec 6, 2016 21:30
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Donkringel posted:I thought you were in this game and figured you had just won it until I reread the player list. No, this game is still going and getting crazier each turn. There's so much stuff I'd like to talk about! But welp, we're still far away from that and I don't want to spoil it. 
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Dec 6, 2016 21:36
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Turn 31 Turn 31 begins with a few levels of Blood Magic researched, then we hit the jackpot again with remote site searching:  Three low level Earth sites in one go giving us +3 Earth. We also get an Astral site giving us another +1 Astral and +1 Death. We also get a few more Earth sites on the province we capture this turn, bringing us to a total of +5 Earth for the turn. We’re really starting to rake it in now! We get our second Enchantress this turn and she ends up being W1N2. It could take forever to get the W2 we need to start remote searching for Water sites, so we use some of our awesome Astral income to alchemize Pearls into Water gems, and this turn we are empowering the new Enchantress to W2. Just another example of how having a large Pearl income can give you real flexibility! Praise and Jubilation! The Might of Zionism has awoken! Our glorious Pretender has finally broken free of his bonds and now exists in the game world. Right now I’m not sure what to do with him, so he is going to sit in our cap and research. Later he’ll be very useful for casting global spells and summoning units, but we don’t have access to those types of spells yet.  Here’s a troubling sign:  One of Pan’s dryads attempted to seduce one of our commanders in the Star Peaks province we secured this turn. Because we took the fort in the province this turn I am not sure if Pan was acting against me or not, so this is troubling. I really don’t want to go to war with Pan right now. Battle reports for the turn start with two (!) in Javal Kish, the Throne province we really, really want. First we kill the Xibalban defenders:  Then, as I suspected, we bump into Pan’s army:  A fight between Heavy Cavalry on one side, and Medium Infantry + Giants on the other.  Our Gibborim are strong enough to cleave a Centaur in two with a single blow!  We win, but take some casualties. However, we don't take enough casualties to make me feel like we lost, so I really hope that Pan will look at this loss and decide that we would be too much trouble to tackle. I’m going to work some diplomancy and try to secure our Peace. Our spoils are a few Earth sites and the Throne of Death   Why do I always end up capturing the negative scale thrones? Regardless, we will be claiming the Throne of Death next turn for both the Dom-spread and the truly fantastic +5 Death income.  Other notable battles for the turn include Xibalba trying to break our siege of their Capitol (all the bats die), and Man joining in against AI Xibalba from the far East. Man sees the opportunity for free land and is taking it, and he’s growing quite big by this point. I may try suggesting to Pangaea that we go to war against Man.  We also take the fortress in Star Peaks, and pretty decisively at that. The province has some magic sites in it that give us an additional +2 Death and +1 Nature.   We are going to be sieging the fort in Xibalba for a while. Xibalba’s capitol fort is the only formidable defensive fortification in what's left of their Empire. As far as I can tell, Xibalba only built lovely little Palisade forts everywhere else. Our troops in Javal Kish are starting to starve, as it is a wasteland province, so we forge several Bags of Wine items that give a supply boost to the commander holding them. We also start construction of a Castle in Javal Kish because we want to be able to recruit Kohen there ASAP. More troops are moved East towards Xibalba in order to try and secure what we’ve taken.  Next turn: Diplomacy, consolidation.
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Dec 6, 2016 23:34
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Won't the Throne of Death be a pretty bad blow since it'll start hurting your pop growth and therefore your gold income/supply? Also, with regards to Blood Slaves, does Dom 4 still have that thing where blood-hunting characters pop the blood slaves into their own inventory rather than the empire supply? Forcing you to manually clear them out of their inventories every time they've hunted some up?
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Dec 6, 2016 23:55
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PurpleXVI posted:Won't the Throne of Death be a pretty bad blow since it'll start hurting your pop growth and therefore your gold income/supply? Well, since we took Growth 3 on our Pretender the +1 Death will bump us down to Growth 2. Growth 2 is still good, though I really love maxed out Growth scales and it always hurts me to reduce them. Still, right now I think the Dom-spread from the Throne is valuable, and the +5 Death gems a turn is actually pretty stupendously good. There are hundreds and hundreds of magic sites in Dominions 4, and just a tiny handful of them give 4+ gems. Death gems are also extremely useful in both summoning and forging. We'll definitely use them. Regarding blood hunting: yes the slaves accrued through blood hunting initially go into the hunter's inventory. However, if the hunter is in a province with a Lab the slaves will, at some point in the turn order, be automatically taken from the hunter's inventory and put into your global stockpile. In many, if not most, games it doesn't make economic sense to build a 500g Lab in each and every blood hunting province, but this is Mo'Money, so we can just do that and eliminate the tedious blood hunting micro by like 90%.
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Dec 7, 2016 00:03
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Oh, yeah, Growth 3 would negate a lot of the issue with that. Good to know about the lab thing, I actually had no idea that feature was in there.
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Dec 7, 2016 00:08
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PurpleXVI posted:Oh, yeah, Growth 3 would negate a lot of the issue with that. Dom4 is full of little things like that. I keep forgetting some units can only healed by labs, for example. (Normal units get their hit points restored after a battle, since mechanically a turn is a full month and a lot can happen in a month. Some kinds of undead or Golems can't, though: If they get hit but survive the battle, the hit points will be permanently down until you can shove them into a lab province for a turn.)
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Dec 7, 2016 01:18
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Turn 32 Turn 32 begins with hitting level 4 in Blood Magic. We are going to take a quick detour from Blood research for one turn and redirect some of our points towards Conjuration. We need to get Conjuration 4 and gain access to Voice of Aspu, the Water remote-searching spell. We also claim the Throne of Death. I hate the +Death scale that it brings, but to be fair we had Growth 3 scales to start and +5 Death gems a turn is a truly significant amount. The Kohen Gadol who claimed the Throne in Javal Kish starts to construct a Lab, and the Castle is only 5 months away from completion. This turn all of our remote site-searching was for nothing, we didn’t get a single dang hit. I hate it when this happens, it is very discouraging, but we will persevere! This turn we are also going to start remote searching for Blood as well. Blood Magic sites are much, much rarer than sites for any other type of magic, but they can but much more powerful as well. Blood sites can give you the option to recruit powerful mages or offer deep discounts on Blood spells. On the rare occasion you find a 30% Blood discount site you significantly increase your odds of winning the game. Speaking of Blood hunting our hunters in Ablach captured 39 slaves this turn! That’s more than enough to keep our blood sacrificing going as well as remote search for blood sites. Last turn we had several of our E2 Yeddeoni forge Earth Boots, which give +1 to Earth when worn. This turn they are putting on the boots and using their new E3 to forge Dwarven Hammers, an item that gives a 2 gem discount when forging other items. Next turn those hammers will be used to forge SDRs at a discount so that we can ramp our blood hunting up even more quickly. There were a few battles of note this turn. First our new Throne province of Javal Kish was amphibiously assaulted by a very lovely Xibalban army in the sea:  A mighty army of shiiiit   A pointless gesture on AI Xibalba’s part. However, this does highlight our trouble with the sea. We don’t have any real Water or Air magic, and Water and Air magic are the schools that allow forging of water-breathing items allowing troops under the sea. My thought at this time is that we could use thugs instead of armies. Our Kohen Gadol are actually beefy dudes, and equipped with a vine shield, ring of water breathing, fire brand, and a piece of cheap armor could very handily thug well enough to kill endless amounts of the lovely frog-men that Xibalba builds underwater. To this end we’ll start forging some of the items we will need to do this, but mainly we are going to have to wait 6 turns to recruit 3 unoccupied Kohen Gadol. Xibalba also attempted to break our siege of their capitol, with predictable results:  And finally we get a scout report showing Man storm a castle held by Bogus & Co:   Bogus the Troll and his companions are independent units that can randomly show up in a province and usually wreck PD and be a general pain in the rear end. They’re all based off of a D&D group one of Dominions 4’s developers played in a decade ago. They’re kind of a fun flavor type thing. Somehow they ended up inside of a fort, but I have no real idea how that happened.  We also caught the Dryad in Star Peaks, something I’m still curious about considering that we spoke with Pangaea on IRC after the previous turn and confirmed our peaceful relationship, and...  In  Diplomacy News we also decided that we are going to attack Man together after we finish stomping out the last Xibalban resistance. Because Caelum is occupied in a war against AI Jomon we will be able to fully focus on fighting Man. Pangaea took the lion's share of Xibalban territory, so we will need to put forth a better effort in the next war, and grab more territory for ourselves. As soon as Xibalban territory is fully absorbed we will move troops West to prepare for a new war!
How are u fucked around with this message at 03:21 on Dec 9, 2016 |
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Dec 9, 2016 02:30
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