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Quick question: is there a handy source for what start biases, including starting province type, different nations have?
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Jan 24, 2017 18:30
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There isn't, no. IME Berytos, LA Atlantis, and LA Marignon start by the coast if they can but beyond that it's hard to get a read on it.
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Jan 24, 2017 19:04
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Do cave nations always get caves.by default?
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Jan 24, 2017 21:31
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Turn 52 Turn 52 is another quiet turn on the Man Invasion front. We summon two more Vampire Lords (Adah and Zillah). We also pull in a record haul of blood slaves. We queue up two new Lords for summoning and have over 100 slaves left over! We set Abel, the Lord we empowered in Blood early on, to start forging more Blood booster items. Eventually we are going to want lots of Blood boosters. We also set 3 Kohen in Javal Kish to summon Se’irim every month, we are going to want to build up armies of them as well. We built a lab in Dead Forest last turn and we are going to start summoning wolves to patrol our latest blood hunting province. When Dead Forest comes online we should be pulling in enough slaves per turn to easily summon three Vampire Lords! Xibalba, apparently enraged by the pitiful death of their Pretender God last turn, launches an all out offensive against us across three provinces. The first, in our coastal province of Summeredge, is repulsed by our fort PD and some crossbows:  Sixty crossbowmen screened by Province Defense can repulse soft, lovely frog-men all day long. The second attack was in Gemer, the province where we killed the Blue Dragon last turn and from which our grand army just departed. Gemer is defenseless, and some stupid dumb frogs re-take the province for Xibalba. When you fight the AI there is often a lot of give-and-take like this. We'll get it back. The third battle was, as we’d counted on, Xibalba trying to break siege in their capitol:  It looks like they emptied their fort of everything inside in order to break our single Scout siege. Our huge sieging army conveniently arrives at the same time, and we meet on the field:  A cunning trap, expertly lain.  Our Se'irim punch frogs so hard they explode in showers of blood and gore. I've never used Se'ir before, but I'm growing to love them. It isn’t even a contest; we even kill Xibalba’s monstrous Hero-Prophet:  A powerful Hero, but the AI decked it out in a bunch of stupid miscellaneous items. A few mages escape but we have cut down just about all of the chaff. Xibalba’s fort should be mainly empty at this point, so we are storming it next turn.  Taking out the trash, and now we can storm a (probably) empty fort.  Next turn we are also returning to the sea. Construction 6 allowed us to forge the Sea King’s Goblet:  The problem wasn't our giants, it was that we didn't have enough giants. One of our Kohen Gadol in our capitol is leading 25 Gibborim into Alluvia. We're returning to the lake, and this time we are going to let our Gibborim do their grim business rather than try to guard commanders. The one point of interest on the Man front for the turn is the scout report we get from Knobville. We successfully stormed the fort with a scout and see that there’s a small defending force inside:  Very little chaff to clog the gate. However, there are enough mages present that they could cause mischief if well-scripted. If we get a couple more points of Dominion in Knobville I think we will send in some Vampires and Levites to take it. There’s not much more to report for the rest of the turn. Man catches 4 (!) of our scouts. I guess he ramped up patrols across his empire, probably looking to catch Pan’s dryads. We will keep pushing our Dom, taking care of the last of Xibalba, and letting Man stew in his untenable position. Victory will be ours!
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Jan 25, 2017 04:54
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You know, it kind of makes me wish that when somebody quit, the AI would start spamming randomly generated names so you'd at least get some amusement out of stomping them.
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Jan 25, 2017 05:55
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Is it normal for an AI opponent to hang in there that long? Or do they usually get chewed up in short order?
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Jan 25, 2017 08:20
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PurpleXVI posted:Is it normal for an AI opponent to hang in there that long? Or do they usually get chewed up in short order? Little of column A, little of column B. The AIs ARE being eaten through aggressively by all their neighbors, but since you'll typically be moving one or two territories at a time unless you've got a lot of raiding groups set up, it can take a while, and it's very common to run into a situation like the dragon and the siege there where you have to go out of your way for multiple turns to deal with Pretenders, sieges, murderballs, and the AIs at-times-frustrating decision-making. If a player goes AI late in the game they might have a lot of resources and competently-scripted mages/armies for the AI to play around with which can slow things down enormously. I mean, take my assessment with a grain of salt, since I don't play  , but everything I've seen suggests this isn't too unusual. It tends to go much quicker if a player goes AI because they suffered a massively catastrophic turn and lost most of their military or mages, because then their neighbors can more confidently split up their armies or send out poorly-kitted minithugs to sweep through PD sooner. There's also the additional problem of dealing with underwater provinces; it's a pain in the rear end getting land-bound units under the waves in any real quantity, so even though most aquatic units suck, you can still get wrecked by attrition. Not sure if there's also still a penalty to non-aquatic units underwater, but if so, that means you'll also be dealing with a malus to...I think its movespeed and stamina recovery?
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Jan 25, 2017 09:35
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There's also a whole lot more forts on these settings, more temples, and the AI can recruit like crazy in every province, so there's just more stuff to chew through in general.
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Jan 25, 2017 10:52
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goatface posted:Do cave nations always get caves.by default?
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Jan 25, 2017 13:38
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PurpleXVI posted:Is it normal for an AI opponent to hang in there that long? Or do they usually get chewed up in short order? Yep! One of the bigger mistakes you can make is devoting too many resources to eating an AI when you have bigger fish to fry. I've seen early game AIs make it to endgame just because they kept a fort or two filled with summoned bullshit that nobody ever got around to finally knocking down. A Mo Money game is a double-edged sword in this regard - you can pump out innumerable legions of siege chaff, but then so can the AI, meaning that if you leave forts unsieged they will balloon with 5g militia.
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Jan 25, 2017 14:49
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Call in ya boy Scabiel. ...actually, is there any sane way to get the Maker of Ruins to, ya know, make ruins? I was under the (possibly mistaken) perception that Doom Horrors don't really take to being ordered around and just disappear or something even if you can leash one.
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Jan 25, 2017 15:15
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ChickenWing posted:Yep! One of the bigger mistakes you can make is devoting too many resources to eating an AI when you have bigger fish to fry. I've seen early game AIs make it to endgame just because they kept a fort or two filled with summoned bullshit that nobody ever got around to finally knocking down. A Mo Money game is a double-edged sword in this regard - you can pump out innumerable legions of siege chaff, but then so can the AI, meaning that if you leave forts unsieged they will balloon with 5g militia. Though I've observed the AI has some odd decision making skills when sieged. I've seen the AI just holding and summoning more chaff, I've seen them trying to break out with everything and I've seen them sending their troops piecemeal at you until the fort is nearly empty and you win by default. I'm guessing the AI has trouble deciding how dangerous certain combinations of troops or mages can be, they'll probably do some sort of calculation based on numerical values, like "Oh, these super-expensive sacreds with 20 encumbrance are threat level 99, better stay inside the fort" and "Oh, these 20 level 2 air mages and the bunch of militia parked in front of them are only threat level 9, we can take them with a full frontal assault"
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Jan 25, 2017 15:21
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Shady Amish Terror posted:Call in ya boy Scabiel. Not really. As far as Doom Horrors go, Scabiel is sorta the booby prize of the bunch. Horrors have whatever the defector trait is at a very high percentage, which means that each turn they roll a very high success rate to determine whether or not they're under your control anymore.
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Jan 25, 2017 15:21
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Caelum News Network Presents More Caelum Turns! Caelum Turn 50 Seeing all my Pale Ones slaughtered under water made me depressed, so I forgot to record this turn. Caelum Turn 51 This turn sees a ludicrous failure of intelligence, as Mictlan mows down all my scouts. My reaction? Sending more scouts into the meatgrinder.  Also, I continue boosting my research using skeleton mentors. I'm also talking about X-Bows, flyers and how I would deal with Bogarus, if it comes to war. Caelum Turn 52 Again no video, but you didn't miss much, just some boring army movements. Next turn at least has stuff happening again. At least looking at my next video my scouts seem to have survived this time. Consider Mictlan scouted. This road leads to past Caelum turns.
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Jan 25, 2017 15:35
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General question: what are the different draft variants popular among goons? I'm familiar with the general kind from ChickenWings and Roland's LPs, as well as baddraft. Any others? Is there a BlindDraft? Where you draft a nation without knowing if it will be your own or someone else's? Someday I will cave and buy this and then pester all of you endlessly for help.
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Jan 25, 2017 17:34
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A blind draft like the one you propose would end up with intentionally gimped nations, since you'd far more likely end up with someone else's nation that the one you picked.
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Jan 25, 2017 17:36
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Drafts are dumb, bad, and the very thought of them hurts my head. Also, draft game participants inevitably spend weeks slowly putting their imaginary nations together in the draft process only for the final mod to be poorly crafted and full of game-ending bugs and/or people losing interest and going AI en-mass in the first couple dozen turns. Don't do drafts, kids!
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Jan 25, 2017 17:40
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Alternatively, do drafts and don't be bad at drafting/modding/not going AI
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Jan 25, 2017 17:51
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ChickenWing posted:Alternatively, do drafts and don't be bad at drafting/modding/not going AI
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Jan 25, 2017 17:58
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This Dom 4 game totally needs more Doom Horrors, I'm with that statement.
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Jan 25, 2017 18:01
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jBrereton posted:The fun part of a draft is picking stuff, and then some poor fucker actually has to hand craft 100g of PD per 10 points and so on which is not enjoyable for them. I stop reading draft lps after the draft, even if there aren't any problems modding it. I like reading people's reasoning behind their picks as well as the teeth grinding when a pick you were counting on gets selected by someone else. Ideas-guy moment: what if you did a Dom 4 game where everyone starts with some basic units and commanders, then after a year you rank everyone by some metric, then do a draft in reverse order that unlocks new units?
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Jan 25, 2017 18:45
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SirPhoebos posted:Ideas-guy moment: what if you did a Dom 4 game where everyone starts with some basic units and commanders, then after a year you rank everyone by some metric, then do a draft in reverse order that unlocks new units? Wouldn't that just either lead to some weird snail race sitution where everybody is trying to do badly for the first year or not affect things at all depeding on whether the stuff you can get in the draft is better than the advantages conferred by a strong early expansion? EDIT: This is, of course, leaving aside the question of whether Dom4 even allows you to add in new units to a nation after the game has started.
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Jan 25, 2017 19:01
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I finally caught up on this thread. I played a ton of Goon Dominions 3 a few years ago and was a participant in one of those LPs where on mod player tried to cover everything. I ended up getting eaten but managed to cast burden of time to screw over the world for the last few turns I was alive. Dominions is a blast.
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Jan 25, 2017 19:14
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SirPhoebos posted:Ideas-guy moment: what if you did a Dom 4 game where everyone starts with some basic units and commanders, then after a year you rank everyone by some metric, then do a draft in reverse order that unlocks new units? We had something similar a while ago: We played a game where every nation was the same bland guys: Basic units and commanders all the same, the only difference was name and color. The map for the game was littered with sites giving out units and the game became a race to get as many good units as you could. I forgot who won that madness in the end, though.
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Jan 25, 2017 19:33
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Cerebral Bore posted:Wouldn't that just either lead to some weird snail race sitution where everybody is trying to do badly for the first year or not affect things at all depeding on whether the stuff you can get in the draft is better than the advantages conferred by a strong early expansion?
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Jan 25, 2017 23:09
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Libluini posted:We had something similar a while ago: We played a game where every nation was the same bland guys: Basic units and commanders all the same, the only difference was name and color. The map for the game was littered with sites giving out units and the game became a race to get as many good units as you could. I forgot who won that madness in the end, though. Oh poo poo, I think I remember this. I got curbstomped real bad, but it was an extremely cool idea.
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Jan 25, 2017 23:24
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Cerebral Bore posted:EDIT: This is, of course, leaving aside the question of whether Dom4 even allows you to add in new units to a nation after the game has started. That's the easy part. That's just basic mod functions: add a unit to the recruitment list and it appears as soon as you re-launch the game.
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Jan 26, 2017 15:59
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Turn 53 Turn 53 begins with a breakthrough in Thaumaturgy research, we now have Thaum 7. Thaum 7 is a good level of research. It contains several really good and/or annoying global spells, none of which we can come close to casting.  Effective and annoying Globals. It also contains the spell Plague, which we can cast. Plague is an army killer, is tricky to use well, but is horrifyingly effective if you can pull it off. Vampires are pretty much perfect Plague delivery vehicles, as the spell requires high level Death to cast and often kills the caster. We should now, in theory, be almost impossible to for any of our current neighbors to invade. Especially Pangaea.  Plague is a sign that says: (Non-Undead, Non-Demon) TRESSPASSERS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT. The usual spells are cast this turn: we summon wolves, we find a single Water site (+1W) with a Voice of Aspu cast, and we summon two new Vampire Lords (Jabal and Jubal). We capture a big bunch of blood slaves but we desperately need more. The province of Dead Forest will begin slave hunting next turn, and there are four more provinces surrounding our capitol that I want to open up ASAP. Several of them are now available for blood hunting because Xibalba is going to be eliminated shortly. We were involved in two battles this turn. First, we returned to the briny depths of the lake:  To remove Frogs apply more Giants as needed. Our force of Gibborim smashed frogs in Alluvia, and now the Kelp Fort in that province is under siege. This time we are going to stick around and take it. We also stormed Xibalba’s capitol fort:  It wasn't much of a fight. There was a rag-tag bunch of defenders left and they melted under the pummeling given by our Se’irim. We lost like 30 crossbows due to the automated arrow fire from the fort towers, but at this point in the game things like crossbowmen are just eating up gold in upkeep costs, so gently caress ‘em. We now have the province of Xibalba and the 37k population that comes with it in addition to the 2D1W1E from its capitol sites. Fifty Levites and one Kohen Gadol are ordered into the sea province of Wailwind Waters, adjacent to Xibalba. Most of the rest of the army is then moving to Gemer to smash the last Xibalban forces left on land.  With the Capitol sacked and taken the underwater remnants of Xibalba will fall very shortly. There was also a hilarious battle between Jomon and Caelum:   As mentioned a couple turns ago, Jomon still exists in 5 provinces in the Southern sea. Apparently they are still harassing poor Caelum with raids from the ocean, utilizing their fearsome Shark Warriors:  I love these guys! They’re beefy, heavily armored, and very strong. When I played Jomon in the first Mo Money game I found them to be great blockers on the battlefield when buffed with a few high level battlefield spells. The fact that Jomon is still in the game and living under the sea warms my heart. The Man front remains quiet, but we are going to take some action. We really need to get this war going again, so we are going to deploy our Vampires and see what happens. We will send three Vampire Lords and a dozen lesser Vampires to storm the fort of Knobville and see what happens. I don’t really expect them to take the fort themselves, but it’ll be interesting to see how effective they are. In the North we are sending six Lords and nearly 50 lesser Vampires to attack the Mannish province of Asanon. I am hoping that they find nothing but PD, smash it, and then we can move some more nasty things in to sit and siege the fort. We have two candles of Dominion in that province, so this is a little bit more of a gamble.  Let's move!  Next turn: When Vampires Attack!
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Jan 31, 2017 02:10
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A heartwarming story of friendly giants and the hordes of bloodsucking undead that carry the word of their divinity and the horrible WMD biological agents they've engineered.
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Jan 31, 2017 02:42
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Are you aiming for a particular global?
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Jan 31, 2017 06:19
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Apocron posted:Are you aiming for a particular global? Well, we have The Eyes of God global spell up already. We have access to score-graph information that nobody else can see. We'll try for some others, but considering how small we are compared to Pangaea and Bogarus, the remaining global spell slots will probably fill up fast.
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Jan 31, 2017 06:45
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Does Plague work fast enough to have an effect in the battle its cast in? Or does it infect enemies in combat, but act on a global turn time scale, so it's more for suicide-bombing enemy armies and then letting them rot in the subsequent turns?
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Jan 31, 2017 08:28
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And this is the same turn from the other side of the world: Caelum Turn 53 In turn 53, operation Ocean Siege continues, with some Shark Warriors stepping up from the watery depths to try to break the siege. They'll inevitably fail of course, but they're still incredibly annoying. And Bogarus finally assaults Mictlan, which forces us to assault Mictlan too, before Bogarus creeps too close to us for comfort. Thanks to Jomon keeping three huge armies pinned down until my row of coastal forts are finished, the assault has to wait for now, though. But a fourth army is slowly making its way through my wooded interior, which should solve this problem soon. Old times, best times
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Jan 31, 2017 11:15
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Turn 54 Turn 54 begins with toads. The Might of Zionism, being a gigantic Black Bull and having grown tired of researching in our capitol for a couple dozen turns, decides to cast a mighty Blood and Nature spell, causing toads to rain from the sky all over the province of Man:  I was looking through our Blood spells the other turn and I realized that our Pretender God could cast it. Rain of Toads is an infamous spell, it used to be OP as all gently caress back in Dominions 3 but now it is merely OK and we’re casting it at Man’s capitol just to give him one additional thing to worry about. If some Mannish Magisters get diseased then all the better (I’m pretty sure his PG can’t, which is a shame). We summon wolves, goats, and two new Vampire Lords (Naamah and Tubal-Cain). We also capture a bunch of blood slaves. Our new hunting province in Dead Forest goes live next turn, and we are aggressively recruiting Kohen across our kingdom to form new squads. There were some great battles this turn! First we see the Vampires we sent to the Mannish province of Asanon:  Our Vampires on the field.  Effortless, beautiful. The PD melts like butter in a microwave. They met only PD and kicked its rear end, Vampires are so lovely to watch in action. Then we move East where we fought several battles against Xibalba. First in Gemer, where we finally have driven the bat men fully into the sea:  Get. Off. My. Land!   Then, under the water, Xibalba tried to break our siege in Alluvia:  We've put our Gibborim into a "Line" battlefield formation, ensuring that no frogs sneak around the sides to poke our vulnerable commanders. And our own second underwater army put Wailwind Waters under siege:  Levite Zealots get in on the undersea action. All victories for us, we killed dozens of chaffy frog-men. Alluvia’s gate has cracked, so we will be storming it next turn and (hopefully) taking our first underwater fort. With Alluvia in our hands several coastal land provinces will no longer be under threat of frog raiding, which means that they have become open for unfettered blood hunting. I’m extremely stoked about this, and have started to move indie commanders into those provinces along with nature mages to start summoning wolves. The final battle involving our forces this turn was the storming of Knobville. We sent three Vampire Lords and two dozen lesser Vampires into the fort last turn, facing down 16 Magisters and assorted Wardens and longbows:  The Battle of Knobville fort: two forces square-off. The lesser Vamps do their thing and fly directly into the Wardens and longbows, striking with their life draining touch attacks. Man’s Magisters put up the familiar Light of the Northern Star spell, and some of them are also scripted to summon dozens of Phantasmal Warriors.  Shazam! Instant Phantasmal Army.  Phantasmal Warriors are illusionary beings, have 1 HP and a negligible attack, but are also ethereal and have reasonable defense. They’re great for clogging up the battlefield and keeping the enemy from reaching you. However:   We are fighting this battle in our own Dominion, and our Dominion is under the influence of The Eyes of God. One of the lesser effects of The Eyes of God is that it dispels illusions within your Dominion. Phantasmal Warriors are illusions, so each round of battle, during our turn, Man’s Phantasms go -poof- in a cloud of 999 damage. Man was hoping to clog up his castle gates, but he is poo poo Outta Luck. Light of the Northern star, however, allows Man’s Magisters to spam the spell Solar Rays on our lesser Vamps:  This Spell Kills Solar Rays is a powerful, single-target anti-undead spell. It pretty much melts our lesser Vampires in two rounds of combat, which is fine because they all simply respawn in our Capitol. The lesser Vamps die just in time for all of the skeletons our Vampire Lords have been summoning to make it through the castle gates:  Knock Knock. Living-Dead here.  Quite a few skeletons! The remaining Wardens and longbows fight valiantly, but cannot deal with the endless tied of skeletons pumped out by our Lords. For some reason the large majority of the Magisters get spooked and flee the field, and then it is only a matter of a few rounds before we win the day. We captured the fortress! I feel like we have some momentum now in this war with Man, so here’s what we are going to do: We will send the Vampire squad that invaded Asanon and move them South one province to Villia, where we have 3 candles of Dominion compared to 1 candle in Asanon. I want to protect and nurture our Vampires, not risk them outside of our Dom. Further South we are going to move our huge army in Ashenton West onto Man’s province of Bahguloth, where a single scout currently maintains our siege. We are going to slowly work our way West, using Vampires to make the initial attack on a Mannish province (to spring any traps), then following with our lumbering siege forces.  Pressing forward into Mannish territory. We're taking the Offensive. In the West we are storming the kelp fortress in Alluvia and hopefully the other Xibalban lake provinces shortly after.  Blood hunting needs to be raised to an absurd level if we want a shot at winning this game, so that’s a priority. We have also spent the last two turns empowering Sabba, our Hero Sybl of Hermon, in Astral. With a cap and a Crystal Coin she is now at Astral 7, and this turn is forging herself a Ring of Sorcery for an additional +1S. We are pouring every last point of Research into Enchantment now, we are going for Enchantment 9, we are going for Arcane Nexus. It is going to take many more turns to get to Enchant 9, but if nobody else has thought to try for it and we make it first and put up Arcane Nexus then we may have a real shot at winning this game, even though both Bogarus and Pangaea are twice our size. I’ll go into it in more detail if we make it that far. Next turn: Kelp Fortress!
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Jan 31, 2017 20:34
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What's the effect of Arcane Nexus?
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Jan 31, 2017 20:48
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I believe it gives the controller extra magic gems. Edit: In Dominions 3, it gave the controller Astral Gems based on the amount of spells cast while it is active (not including Astral and Blood), I imagine it does the same thing in Dom4. Green Intern fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Jan 31, 2017 |
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Jan 31, 2017 21:04
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PurpleXVI posted:What's the effect of Arcane Nexus? Any time any player (including yourself) uses gems for casting spells or forging, you get some percentage of the gems spent (half according to the description, but I'm somewhat suspicious of that. SP testing never seems to net me anywhere near the number of gems I think I should be getting considering how much the AI loves to cast random summon rituals). Not applicable to blood slaves and Astral Pearls. You still get some gems each turn even if no rituals were cast or items forged. It's incredibly powerful and it along with Astral Corruption are probably regarded as the absolute best globals overall.
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Jan 31, 2017 21:12
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PurpleXVI posted:What's the effect of Arcane Nexus? Whenever gems are spent anywhere in the world (expect blood/astral), you get a 50% back as astral gems. Since astral gems can be converted into other gems the most efficiently of all, it essentially ends up with you getting unlimited gems while it is up. It also leads nicely into another great strategy... literally wishing your way to victory. Chances are that How Are U might actually get away with casting his spell because two other nations are twice his size. Otherwise, it is usually the kind of spell that gets you dog-piled (vamps are really good at defending though).
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Jan 31, 2017 21:24
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Arcane Nexus is one of the big global enchantments in the game. It make is so that every none blood spell in the game has half the gems spent on it converted into astral gems and given to the owner of the spell.
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Jan 31, 2017 21:31
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Honestly, at this point Man's player should have noticed that How are u has been heavily blood saccing and is starting to extensively use vampires - and been yelling in diplo channels about those two things to every other player. Heavy blood saccing combined with vampire hordes are one of those things that it's not too hard to get a dogpile going against if you actually make an effort to try and get one together. No way to tell if they haven't done so though, or if they have simply been unwisely ignored.
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Jan 31, 2017 21:38
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