|
Also, there's like 100 other things I'd much rather spend precious nature gems on than planting dumb boars in enemy territory.
|
#
?
Jan 7, 2017 03:39
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 10, 2024 00:21 |
|
|
I'm guessing that the non-Lord vampires are literally just Vampire Lords with a bit less of everything?
|
|
#
?
Jan 7, 2017 07:22
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:I'm guessing that the non-Lord vampires are literally just Vampire Lords with a bit less of everything? Pretty much, yeah. Vampires are wonderful, but as someone else said, they are mainly defensive in nature, very rarely you will send them outside your dominion. But the big pro is that you are a blood nation, being able to push your dominion aggressively by blood sacrifices. Basically, you push your dominion into a neighbour and your endless hordes of vampires take hold of it, entrenching themselves in, without fear of death, like World War I but with fangs and horrible blood magic.
|
|
#
?
Jan 7, 2017 10:38
|
|
|
How are u posted:Also, there's like 100 other things I'd much rather spend precious nature gems on than planting dumb boars in enemy territory. Man, I wish everyone would be like you. For some reason I just sometimes end up next to a fucker who thinks sending like half a dozen pigs all at once is hilarious.
|
|
#
?
Jan 7, 2017 22:07
|
|
|
Libluini posted:Man, I wish everyone would be like you. For some reason I just sometimes end up next to a fucker who thinks sending like half a dozen pigs all at once is hilarious. Well yeah, that's because it is.
|
|
#
?
Jan 7, 2017 22:13
|
|
|
Sounds a bit boaring lol
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2017 01:47
|
|
|
sebmojo posted:Sounds a bit boaring lol booooo
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2017 01:57
|
|
|
Don't be so priggish, man, puns are a meal best served with a side of ham.
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2017 02:35
|
|
|
If I ever played the game I would absolutely send them ham, fam I honestly would probably not last long in games like these because I usually think of horrible ways to inflict fun upon others and this game seems ripe for that
|
|
#
?
Jan 8, 2017 03:40
|
|
|
Turn 44 Turn 44 begins with hitting our Evocation research goal as well as the first few levels of Enchantment. At Evocation 5 we gain access to the spell Earthquake:  Our E2 Yeddeoni mages can put on a +1 E pair of Earth Boots, cast Summon Earth Power in battle, and be able to cast Earthquake. It’s not a spell you generally use offensively, but it could prove to be a surprising and deadly trap for Man if he tries to counter-invade us in coming turns. Now we'll pour all of our remaining research points into Enchantment. At Enchantment 5 and 6 there are a couple of spells that will make our Vampires even more dangerous, capable of taking on entire armies by themselves. Our remote site-searching spells turn up nothing, and we’re running out of sites to search. Looks like the only way to get more magic gems from this point forward is going to be through conquest. We also summon two more Vampire Lords, who we name Seth and Enoch. I think it is fun to continue the theme, so we’ll be naming all of our Vamps using names from the Biblical lineage of Adam. Curse of Blood is cast twice more for next turn, and all of the other Vampires are set to summon allies. Here’s the lesser vampire that they summon:  Like their Vampire Lord leaders these guys are Invulnerable, can fly, are resistant to slash and blunt damage, regenerate, and are immortal. They are fantastic at flying across the battlefield to gum up the enemy works, and can actually stick around fairly well with their regeneration and life-drain attack. And, of course, when they die in your Dominion they just pop up at the Capitol next turn, ready to go again. We want to have hundreds of these guys, and we aim to eventually have 10 or so Vampire Lords doing nothing but summoning lesser vampires every turn. There are several interesting battle reports this turn. First we see that Pangaea started the war with Man. Pan has attacked multiple provinces on the Eastern front and is currently sieging several Mannish forts. All but one of those battles was just Pan smashing fort PD. The outlier, however, was pretty interesting:  It looks like Pan lost 55 of his expensive, elite, sacred, cap-only Dryad Hoplites! That’s a nasty loss. They are 45g each so that is 2,475g lost in this battle alone.  We can see that Pan sent the Dryad Hoplites into battle unblessed, and had them march slowly across the field under fire. Dryad Hoplites have Awe, which makes them very hard to hit in melee combat, but archers don’t give a poo poo about it and were happy to pepper the Hoplites with arrows.  The Hoplites made it into melee but were stuck engaging the front line of Longbows while all of the archers in the rear continued to fill them with arrows. Eventually the beastmen's morale broke, and they fled. I can’t say I’m disappointed to see this loss for Pangaea. In Dominions you should always be happy to see others fail, even if they are your friends. The other interesting battle this turn involved Man trying to take that Monolith + Watcher Throne that’s been sitting unmolested for many turns now:  Man brings a bunch of Knights, Longbows, and a Flame Spirit. The Flame Spirit is a medium-level Conjuration summon that comes with F3, enough fire magic to cast Flaming Arrows and make all of those archers even more deadly.  The Throne defense:  The Flame Spirit does indeed cast Flaming Arrows, and Man has positioned his army far enough to the rear of the battlefield that the defending Watchers cannot hit them with their devastating lightning bolts.  Unfortunately for Man, the Monolith and the Watchers have tons of hitpoints, tons of natural protection (being made of stone), and are pierce resistant. Even the flaming arrows don’t do much more than scratch ‘em. After two turns Man’s Knights, which were set to Hold and Attack, charge forward…directly into Watcher range:  They’re mown down with frightening efficiency. Ten turns later Man’s Longbows run out of arrows and bravely march across the field to try and engage the Throne Defenders in melee:  Man loses 75% of his Knights and about 45% of his Longbows. Even worse, he loses the Flame Spirit. Flame Spirits are 30 Fire gems a pop, not a trivial investment, so that has to hurt. Man doesn’t get Fire magic naturally from any of his recruitable mages, so my best guess is that his Pretender is his original source of Fire and the one summoning Fire Spirits. There was an interesting unexpected event this turn:  An army of shades and shadows attacks us in Winter Peaks, easily slaughtering the unprepared province defense:  Our fort in Winter Peaks is now under siege, though that isn’t a huge problem as all of the mages inside are still able to research and forge. We move a detachment of Gibborim towards Winter Peaks to eventually get rid of the shades a few turns from now. Finally, we move the bulk of our troops that weren’t directly on our border with Man to that border. Next turn Man will look and see our invasion on his doorstep, and the turn after that we will be invading. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 01:14
|
|
|
please tell me it's not normal to have forts in literally every province outside your cap circle in normal midgames.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 03:18
|
|
|
Voyager I posted:please tell me it's not normal to have forts in literally every province outside your cap circle in normal midgames. Mo Money is probably to blame here. I was going to make a joke about spamming Mott and Baileys, but apparently Dom4 massively simplified castles overall (which is good, I guess).
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 03:22
|
|
|
Voyager I posted:please tell me it's not normal to have forts in literally every province outside your cap circle in normal midgames. It's a more money, more resources game, so not incredibly unusual. In a normal game most nations probably don't want to do that.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 03:23
|
|
|
Voyager I posted:please tell me it's not normal to have forts in literally every province outside your cap circle in normal midgames. In a Mo' Money game, generally, you have so much gold income that it makes sense to put a fort in virtually every province, because then you can recruit mages in virtually every province. Magic wins games, so having more mages means you'll be more powerful.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 03:31
|
|
|
It seems like Mo' Money would really weaken nations that rely on powerful cap only units. You get the same number of them, but you get more then twice the amount of everything else so as a percentage of you army anything cap only is much lower then in a normal game. Meanwhile nations with powerful recruit anywhere scareds get even more terrifying.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 05:24
|
|
|
Any chance of a fresh zoom-out with delineated borders? Because it looks like Man has a pretty big chunk of the map, and I'm curious to see how it lines up vs Gath and Pan.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 11:37
|
|
|
Vorpal Cat posted:It seems like Mo' Money would really weaken nations that rely on powerful cap only units. You get the same number of them, but you get more then twice the amount of everything else so as a percentage of you army anything cap only is much lower then in a normal game. Meanwhile nations with powerful recruit anywhere scareds get even more terrifying. On the other hand, nations with great cap sacreds tend to expand faster and get more land in the initial rush, which pays big dividends later.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 16:58
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:Any chance of a fresh zoom-out with delineated borders? Because it looks like Man has a pretty big chunk of the map, and I'm curious to see how it lines up vs Gath and Pan.  Man and Pangaea are similarly sized, but Pangaea is the bigger of the two. We are about 2/3 of the size of Man. This map is made from memory so it's not 100% accurate, but it gives the general idea. Important to note that Pangaea is a big, and honestly I'd have been fine allying with Man against the beast-men except for the fact that Man's player was hardly ever on IRC, and thus impossible to make plans with. e: the Red in the lakes is AI Xibalba still hanging out in there, and the red splotch in our territory is our ongoing siege of Xibalba's capitol. More on that next turn... How are u fucked around with this message at 20:13 on Jan 11, 2017 |
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 20:11
|
|
|
Vorpal Cat posted:It seems like Mo' Money would really weaken nations that rely on powerful cap only units. You get the same number of them, but you get more then twice the amount of everything else so as a percentage of you army anything cap only is much lower then in a normal game. Meanwhile nations with powerful recruit anywhere scareds get even more terrifying. This WOULD seem to track, except that the list of "recruit anywhere" sacreds is extremely small, and of that small group they're generally either trash (ex. Khlysts) or cheap enough that nations don't really have trouble recruiting large numbers of them regardless (ex. Jags and Eagles). There are really probably less than a handful of "recruit anywhere" sacreds that really benefit from this, and they're generally not attached to particularly bless-heavy nations in the first place (ex. Knights of the Chalice). Meanwhile, nations like LA Ragha, EA Niefelheim, and MA Ys, with enormously expensive but incredibly powerful cap-only sacred units, can now recruit extremely large numbers of them. These are nations that wouldn't really benefit in a normal game even if you removed the cap-only tag on their sacreds, simply because there are only so many 120+ gp troops you can afford regardless of other limitations. In More Money games though, they can now basically just set their cap to making the maximum amount each turn and call it a day. LA Ragha in particular also has rather good non-sacred heavy cavalry that also heavily benefits from being able to afford hordes of them. Lord Koth fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Jan 11, 2017 |
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 20:49
|
|
|
Assuming Man crumbles before the pincer attack, is this shaping up to be a Gath vs Pan end-game showdown? Or are some of the other players also dangerously big?
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2017 22:50
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:Assuming Man crumbles before the pincer attack, is this shaping up to be a Gath vs Pan end-game showdown? Or are some of the other players also dangerously big?
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2017 00:27
|
|
|
Zereth posted:Well, according the map posted earlier there's nobody else around, so looks like it. Haha, oh, no friend. He asked for a map showing the set-up for the coming war. All of that unmarked territory to the South is owned by Bogarus, Caelum, Ragha, and Mictlan. We don't have very good eyes in those areas, so our knowledge is incomplete. However, Bogarus (who basically borders all of the Southern border of Man) looks like he could be very big indeed. I pointedly did not ask Bogarus to join in on our alliance with Pangaea against Man because I don't want Bogarus to gobble up any more territory than he already has! e: I took 5 minutes to not be lazy and filled in the rest of that map. Note that this is not the entirety of the world. Ragha and Mictlan exist further South. 
How are u fucked around with this message at 01:18 on Jan 12, 2017 |
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2017 01:11
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:Assuming Man crumbles before the pincer attack, is this shaping up to be a Gath vs Pan end-game showdown? Or are some of the other players also dangerously big? Bogarus has powerful mages with varied paths, so they're viewed as one of the bigger late game threats.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2017 01:39
|
|
|
How are u posted:Ragha and [...] exist further South. I'm wondering about that, if you look at my maps in my turns around this time, you'll never see Ragha. And to my south there's only ocean, followed by Gath (because of the south-north wraparound.). Up to the current turn, I can't ever remember meeting Ragha. Or seeing any sign of it. Most recent Caelum-turns Caelum Turn 43 In this turn I'm kicking Jomon's corpse some more. Also, no sign of Ragha anywhere. Where is that guy?  Caelum Turn 44 Here there's no link because I forgot to make a recording of this turn.  Ye olden turns Edit: Something about the link to the old videos was weird, so I redid it. Now it should work normally. Libluini fucked around with this message at 02:07 on Jan 12, 2017 |
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2017 01:45
|
|
|
Going by who has what available, either Caelum or Pangaea probably has the best idea of the current map. Both have flying scouts, which means they can cover vast distances quickly. Pangaea's in particular is forest-recruit, which means you don't even need to take turns away from mage recruitment. It's not uncommon for late-game Pangaea to have scouts revealing most of the world. As for this game, I'm actually surprised Bogarus is as large as it is, unless they formed a coalition against someone else and managed to reap most of the rewards. Bogarus has okay troops but nothing particularly special, and while they do have good magic paths, it still takes time to get the research to really use it. Especially compared to what Ragha can field, or the absolute hordes of blessed troops Mictlan can. Though Mictlan may be slightly distracted and gobbling up the ocean provinces, since with Xibalba out there's no one else who can really contest him there. edit: Actually, I'd forgotten Jomon in regards to underwater. Though with how thoroughly Caelum has been mauling them above water, I'm somewhat surprised Mictlan hasn't picked off their underwater stuff. Especially since they went AI a while ago. wiegieman posted:Bogarus has powerful mages with varied paths, so they're viewed as one of the bigger late game threats. Very specifically, they have at least some access to everything except Water and Nature, though their Earth and Death access is relatively poo poo - only a single level on a single mage each, neither of which can get randoms. The real reason people don't like them in the late game is because they have mages with both Blood and Astral, which means easy Horror spamming. People tend to not like nations with easy access to Horror spam. Lord Koth fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Jan 12, 2017 |
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2017 01:49
|
|
|
Lord Koth posted:This WOULD seem to track, except that the list of "recruit anywhere" sacreds is extremely small, and of that small group they're generally either trash (ex. Khlysts) or cheap enough that nations don't really have trouble recruiting large numbers of them regardless (ex. Jags and Eagles). There are really probably less than a handful of "recruit anywhere" sacreds that really benefit from this, and they're generally not attached to particularly bless-heavy nations in the first place (ex. Knights of the Chalice). Good anywhere mages probably more than troops.
|
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2017 01:28
|
|
|
Speleothing posted:Good anywhere mages probably more than troops. To build on that: the definition of "Good" can change in a Mo'Money type game as well. Take this fine fellow, for example:  This is the Master Shugenja, one of LA Jomon's recruit-anywhere mages. Note how his random path picks are structured in a way in that you can end up with a really diverse combination of potential paths. In a normal-settings game of Dom 4 this could be annoying. You may only be recruiting half a dozen or fewer of these guys a turn, and if you're hoping for a F2, A2, N3, or E3 combination it's possible you'll never actually see one. If you make it to the mid-game of a Mo'Money game, though, you'll soon have hundreds of them. Now that ridiculous potential path diversity isn't offset by the rarity of actually getting optimal paths, and you reap the benefits of being able to natively cast all sorts of great stuff.
|
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2017 02:44
|
|
|
Man those 37 years have not been good to that guy.
|
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2017 02:51
|
|
|
Yeah that is one busted 37 year-old. Mountain life is hard life.
|
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2017 02:54
|
|
|
Turn 45 poo poo is getting real in this game. Turn 45 begins with an in-game message from Man:  It’s a nice message and I like the guy’s spunk, but the die has been cast. Man has certainly noticed our troop build-up along the border, and he's expecting our imminent invasion. We hit Enchantment 4 and will hit Enchantment 5 next turn for Horde of Skeletons. We will then research Conjuration 5 for the Nature spell, Howl, a useful battlefield enchantment.  Our remote site-searchers find nothing, but our slave hunting parties pull in a glorious haul of virgins. We are well underway in our transition into a Blood Economy, which is good because this turn we started with zero (yes, zero) gold. We cancel all of our mage recruitment other than a couple of forts producing Kohen and our cap-only Kohen Gadol. Troop recruitment is limited to the border with Man, plus maxed out Gibborim in our capitol. One of our Yeddeoni mages in the province of Range of Light was attacked by a fearsome spider in an assassination attempt:   Come at me bro. Let’s take a look at the battles this turn. First we see Xibalba feebly swats at our undersea explorers, well done!  Frog-men gonna frog, and be poo poo. There are a few real and actual battles between Man and Pangaea armies as well:  Hundreds of minotaur, I'm glad this isn't us.  Poorly scripted mages mean the beastmen army cut through the Mannish lines like a hot knife through butter. They go about how I expected they would. Man is unfortunately scripting his mages to cast feeble single lightning bolts, which are powerful but don’t have a shred of hope of halting the screaming hordes of Pangaean beast-men Man is facing. The Mannish armies are ripped to shreds. This does bode well for our own imminent invasion, however. Looks like there’s a battle in Xibalba, probably some more plinky frog men from the se-  !!! What the hell?! Jesus Christ. Xibalba emptied its entire capitol to break our siege, and break it they did:  Our defending siege force.  Literally everything the AI could summon over a dozen turns.  The battle is joined!  Dragon Breath.  Our brave and mighty Gibborim and Levite Zealots wade into battle against a tide of horrifying skeleton beasts, demon bats, claymen, and of course Xibalba’s Pretender God, a goddamn W9 Blue Dragon. Our sacred infantry takes casualties, but they hit back just as hard. The event that seals our defeat occurs here:   Old men in robes don't fare well against demon-bats. A handful of Beast Bats and Serpent Fiends seem to have been scripted to "Attack Archers". Our tiny contingent of maybe 15 crossbows were sitting at the back of the field, right next to our mages and commanders. The flying demons take a few turns to kill all the crossbowmen, and then they move on to the exhausted mages.  Run away! Our Gibborim and Levites put up a hell of a fight [Our Double-Bless may have tanked our Scales, but it is fantastic on the field], and may even have eventually killed their way to the back of Xibalba’s line and gutted some mages. However, with our army decapitated they fled the field and were slaughtered en mass as they did so. Alright, that was bad, but we can recover. We are going to consolidate the various forces we have spread out around the Xibalba region. We are aiming to rebuild a blob that can re-take Xibalba’s capitol. The contingent of Gibborim we were sending South to liberate Winter Peaks from the small army of sieging shades is redirected East, we really need more of those elite giants. In our Throne province of Javal Kish we are finally ready to set into motion something I've been planning ever since we went to war with Xibalba. Six Kohen begin to cast one of our national summoning spells, one that can only be cast in Wasteland provinces. This is one of the reasons I wanted Javal Kish so badly, it is the only Wasteland type province anywhere near us, an unfortunate quirk of this game map. We'll soon be unleashing a new, terrible weapon on the battlefield.  Scrambling to defend our Throne and consolidate scattered troops. The setback in Xibalba also does not mean that we are delaying our invasion of Man. We set three large armies on our border to advance into Man’s territory. Hopefully we can smash through a couple of forts before Man is able to marshal a serious counter-attack. Our armies of sacred infantry are bolstered with supporting crossbows, D2 Yeddeoni to cast Horde of Skeletons once we research it, and Abba nature mages with +1 Nature Thistle Maces who will be able to cast Howl when we storm Mannish castles. Next turn this War really begins.  We end the turn with a prayer, crossed fingers, and a replay to Man’s message:   Next turn: War!
|
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2017 23:42
|
|
|
Does the AI know any sort of subtlety or strategy or is it just good at building big doom-blobs and sending them at anything it perceives as weaker than itself?
|
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2017 23:47
|
|
|
No, but it builds bad doomed blobs.
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2017 00:06
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:
AI for videogames is difficult. AI for strategy games is notoriously difficult. AI for a strategy game more complicated than Risk is a herculean endeavor. AI for a strategy game with a problem space as large as Dominions has probably never been done well, by anyone. The Dominions AI in 4 is probably better than in Dom 3 (or I'd hope so, at least!), but Dominions AI is sort of infamous for cultivating giant doom blobs of extremely questionable and poor unit compositions and then expending them in stupid ways. Occasionally it will hit upon frustratingly powerful armies simply by the sheer volume of units it likes to mass, but from what I recall it basically employs no strategic decision-making at all and won't make any specific effort to counter battlefield evocations spam or skeleton spam or mind-hunting or any other of the myriad strategies a player can use to neuter an unwary opponent. If I recall right, I think the AI also preferentially spends gems on summoning units before casting rituals or crafting gear, so they often have piles of low-level summoned garbage around.
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2017 00:13
|
|
|
All that said, I found out recently that the AI is at least capable of fielding and using communions. When you're not expecting it, that can be tremendously lovely to just run into randomly.
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2017 00:18
|
|
|
Dammit, I remember an earlier LP talked about the Gath wasteland thing but I can't remember what it is. Guess I'll find out! And the thing about the AI in Dominions, do you really want to have it too challenging? The game is primarily about PvP, so having the AI be poo poo seems about right; it would be pretty embarassing if someone went AI and the AI won...
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2017 00:21
|
|
|
Deceitful Penguin posted:The game is primarily about PvP, so having the AI be poo poo seems about right If the AI wasn't poo poo, the game would be a much better single-player experience, so it wouldn't have to be a game primarily about PvP.
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2017 00:44
|
|
Leperflesh posted:All that said, I found out recently that the AI is at least capable of fielding and using communions. When you're not expecting it, that can be tremendously lovely to just run into randomly. I think that the AI will not change- or is unlikely to change- existing scripts once you go AI. So sometimes you will run into an AI blob that still has a vein of nasty human malice woven into a tapestry otherwise composed of terminal stupidity. That said, the AI is allegedly now better at cultivating and preserving ritual casters now?
|
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2017 01:33
|
|
|
Lord Koth posted:As for this game, I'm actually surprised Bogarus is as large as it is, unless they formed a coalition against someone else and managed to reap most of the rewards. Bogarus has okay troops but nothing particularly special, and while they do have good magic paths, it still takes time to get the research to really use it. Bogarus has decent cheap mages and with a more money game hopefully has a lot more of them than otherwise. He can communion up air, astral, blood, death and fire and lay waste once he hits 5 in many fields, and with his master of names getting a research bonus, that shouldn't take too long. His demonologists and alchemists may never handle huge death/earth rituals, but on the battlefield they should be able to handle most stuff with a communion.
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2017 01:45
|
|
|
Is the bird economy active for even more riches?
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2017 01:47
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 10, 2024 00:21 |
|
|
goatface posted:Is the bird economy active for even more riches? The what?
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2017 02:33
|
|