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Lord Koth posted: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. This is definitely what I would be doing in his situation. It is very much in the interest of nations that do not have easy access to Vampires to gang up on the nations that do.
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Jan 31, 2017 22:31
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Yeah, it seriously looks like you're starting to his the critical mass of vamps here. Not fun going up against that, and especially not when blood sac is going on.
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Jan 31, 2017 23:09
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Lord Koth posted: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. At this point I think there are multiple "Big Bads" and no one can accurately point out whose strategy will run away the game. Bogarus research and bird economy, Gath blood sacrifice and vampires, or Pangaea large gently caress you force of angry animals.
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Jan 31, 2017 23:44
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CNN Presents Caelum Turn 54 In this turn I execute-murder some scouts. One from Gath (sorry How are u) and two from Bogarus. Espionage: Deleted! Sadly Mictlan does the same thing to two of my own scouts. Operation Ocean Siege continues with the construction of one of the missing coastal fortresses and we dump Jomon's shark warriors into the next McDonalds so our citizens can get more of their favourite food: McFish. Special highlight of this turn: Random trolls show up to troll me. We also finally start invading Mictlan. The other turns. You know the drill.
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Jan 31, 2017 23:58
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Donkringel posted:At this point I think there are multiple "Big Bads" and no one can accurately point out whose strategy will run away the game. Bogarus research and bird economy, Gath blood sacrifice and vampires, or Pangaea large gently caress you force of angry animals. So you're saying that because of bird shenanigans and animal armies, the world could not decide if a sea of murderous vampires was a bad thing or not?
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Feb 1, 2017 01:56
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The world might have trouble deciding which Big Bad is the Biggest Bad, I think is the point. And while everyone argues about who's most dangerous, the vampire swarms grow.
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Feb 1, 2017 02:09
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Crazycryodude posted:The world might have trouble deciding which Big Bad is the Biggest Bad, I think is the point. And while everyone argues about who's most dangerous, the vampire swarms grow. Admittedly, so does the bird economy.
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Feb 1, 2017 02:11
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Cathode Raymond posted:So you're saying that because of bird shenanigans and animal armies, the world could not decide if a sea of murderous vampires was a bad thing or not? Something funny I just noticed: Late Age Mictlan also has tons of blood magic available, but for some reason Mictlan's player in this game never really used it to great effect. And so he now gets attacked by both Bogarus and me, which basically telegraphs the ending: One blood nation less in Mo Money.
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Feb 1, 2017 02:11
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It's not so much the vampires alone, as it is that Gath also has blood saccing. Either on their own are regarded as extremely dangerous, but now Gath is using both. Heavy blood saccing means vampires can be used far more offensively than normal. Even more than the vampire hordes, it's the BLOOD SACCING that should be getting a posse together, the vampires are just the cherry on top. Bird economy can get you neat stuff, but you still need to turn it into other things to really use the rewards. Vampires + blood saccing means "Well, I'm tossing a horde of vampires at you... Oh, you killed them? They're hitting you again next turn too. And the next." Seriously, go look at that map - Man has lost dominion control of provinces in his cap circle, let alone ones further afield. Even without how insanely good vampires are in that situation, having someone else's dominion intruding that much is dangerous for any number of reasons.
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Feb 1, 2017 04:43
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Lord Koth posted:It's not so much the vampires alone, as it is that Gath also has blood saccing. Either on their own are regarded as extremely dangerous, but now Gath is using both. Heavy blood saccing means vampires can be used far more offensively than normal. Even more than the vampire hordes, it's the BLOOD SACCING that should be getting a posse together, the vampires are just the cherry on top. All of the above is true, which is why I find it so amusing that Gath didn't start Blood Saccing until their OWN Dominion was threatened by (IIRC) someone else's Saccing. Which might explain the lack of posse, come to think on it.
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Feb 1, 2017 10:01
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Dom kill is scary, you can end up in a situation where you suddenly notice the dominion is dropping in your provinces massively, realise you need to build a temple in every province and start massing priests everywhere and its still not enough and you get dom killed 5 turns later, despite having 20 provinces and winning the conventional war with who you are fighting. When your opponent is generating 4 times the temple checks each turn from their temples compared to yours, things get out of hand quickly!
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Feb 1, 2017 21:20
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The Dominion mechanics were so much more ridiculous in 3, as well. It was not unusual for newer players to take less than five dominion score in their build while trying to make room for a very ambitious strategy, only to die from Dominion loss in the first year because fewer than half of their temple checks were succeeding even before taking into account enemy dominion.
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Feb 1, 2017 22:20
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Shady Amish Terror posted:The Dominion mechanics were so much more ridiculous in 3, as well. It was not unusual for newer players to take less than five dominion score in their build while trying to make room for a very ambitious strategy, only to die from Dominion loss in the first year because fewer than half of their temple checks were succeeding even before taking into account enemy dominion. The way resistance worked was even worse, it was very easy to just pile on 100% resists against stuff and basically make invulnerable super-monsters. On the other hand, now with the new and improved system it's theoretically possible to do enough damage to hurt a fire elemental with fire. On the other other hand, if you gave creatures in Dom3 stuff which lowered their resists, you could get fire elementals so weak they died to a harsh Summer day. gently caress it, I give up. 
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Feb 1, 2017 23:15
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I kind of like the idea that there can be extra-special, magical Fire that is so hot that it will harm a being made of living flame. Hardcore, bro.
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Feb 2, 2017 02:20
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Just gotta exhaust the oxygen hard enough.
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Feb 2, 2017 02:36
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Turn 55 Turn 55 begins with a research breakthrough in Enchantment. We are now at Enchantment 7, which contains a bunch of great spells of all types. There are some globals like Earth Blood Deep Well and Gift of Health as well as battlefield spells like Mass Flight. We are going to cast one global from Enchant 7 immediately: Stellar Focus. Stellar Focus is an interesting gem-gen global, it seems fairly underpowered for where it sits in its school of magic. It only costs 30 pearls to cast and generates +5 pearls a turn, while Earth Blood Deep Well is at the same level and generates 10 or more Earth a turn. Either way, Stellar Focus pays for itself after 6 turns so we’ll cast it at minimum strength and start saving pearls on our way to Enchantment 9.  Some of the offerings in Enchantment 7. We cast site searching spells (nothing), summon wolves, cast Rain of Toads on Man’s capitol once again, and summon two more Vampire Lords (Gomer and Magog). We are actually only going to summon one Vampire Lord next turn, we are using the slaves we’d have spent on the second Lord to summon an Arch Devil instead. We forged a couple of Blood boosters and now one of our Fire and Blood Kohen Gadol has the paths to do so. There are several levels of unique demons to summon through the Blood school of magic. There are only 5 Arch Devils, so I figure if they are still available we should try and grab them. There were a couple of battle reports this turn. Caelum sent an army to stomp out some indie Trolls that attacked one of his provinces through an event. Pangaea was attacked by AI Ragha, indicating that Pan is indeed trying to take some Ragha provinces before Bogarus can gobble them all up:  The beast-men are aggressively taking a bite out of Ragha. Ragha sent some Living Statues led by one of its myriad national summons, an Ahurani:  Extremely beefy blockers.  One of the myriad summons in the 'Zoroastrian' set of national spells accessible to Caelum-influenced nations. Ragha has just tons of interesting, flavorful national summons that are based on Zoroastrian myth. Caelum shares them as well, actually. The Vampire squad we sent to attack Villia smashed the PD without losses. We’re going to move them back again to Asanon. Our tide of pushed Dominion rises and falls and now Asanon has 4 candles to Villia’s 3. Also it’ll help keep Man off guard, hopefully.  Look at all of the lovely green numbers, indicating Vampires absorbing extra health from their victims. There was a battle in Xibalba!? Looks like Xibalba successfully Called their PG back this turn. When a Pretender dies every commander with Priest levels gains the option to spend the turn performing “Call God”. Each level of Priestly power counts toward a cumulative total of 50 (plus or minus ~10 or so), after which your God appears in your Capitol, good as new except for -1 level of every magic path. Xibalba has a boat-load of lovely little mage-priests sitting in his underwater forts, and I’m pretty certain that the AI prioritizes Call God above just about everything else. Anyway, we hurt the Dragon enough to make it retreat and die again.  A Pretender that dies to PD. A shameful Pretender. We also stormed Xibalba’s underwater Kelp Fort! Kelp Forts are not very exciting or grand, so that’s that. We’re moving underwater forces East to take the next Kelp Fort shortly. Xibalba is almost out of provinces and even more so almost out of Dominion. I’m pretty sure that Xibalba has 2 or 3 candles left in the world, so they may actually be Dom-killed before I can take the last of their provinces. How the mighty have fallen!  Kelp walls don't strike me as particularly robust.  "Mopping-up" action  We are going to send a scout into the Mannish fort in Bahguloth to see what’s inside. I’m kind of expecting Man to attack us, otherwise it seems like he’s decided to hole up in his forts and await death, which is possible too.  I mean, how do you counter a Blood-Sac + Vampire push? We have over 13,000 points of research to go to get to Enchantment 8, and then there will be an even more massive hump before we can hit 9. We’re going for gold, however, and keeping our eyes on the prize.  Getting closer...
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Feb 2, 2017 02:50
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Remind me, what shenanigan awaits us at enchantment 9? Is it that astral nexus spell?
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Feb 2, 2017 05:44
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Stellar cascades really sorta give away your plan doesn't it?
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Feb 2, 2017 06:50
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Stellar Focus seems pretty wimpy for a global enchant, +5 gems every turn? That's not a HUGE deal.
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Feb 2, 2017 07:18
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How are u posted:I kind of like the idea that there can be extra-special, magical Fire that is so hot that it will harm a being made of living flame. Hardcore, bro. People are made of flesh and bone, but are not immune to being punched.
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Feb 2, 2017 07:53
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By the way, can someone explain blood sac to me? I understand that you need a temple, some slaves, and a priest to sacrifice those slaves, but what does it do in Dom 4? How strong is it compared to normal preaching? Is it affected by the strength of the priest or whether the priest knows blood? All I can see from this thread is that it's easily capable of domkilling, but do you just sacrifice slaves and that's it, you're domkilling somebody?
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Feb 2, 2017 10:08
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Eeepies posted:By the way, can someone explain blood sac to me? I understand that you need a temple, some slaves, and a priest to sacrifice those slaves, but what does it do in Dom 4? How strong is it compared to normal preaching? Is it affected by the strength of the priest or whether the priest knows blood? From what I understand from googling (and if I get any of it wrong, please, actual Dom4 players, correct me): Dominion is spread through a mechanic called a "temple check" - a calculation to determine whether or not a given source of dominion will "push" more dom out into the world. Each successful temple check increases your total Dominion out in the map by a candle (I think). Most nations have four sources of temple checks - the presence of their God, who generates a temple check just by hanging around, the presence of their Prophet, who also is assumed to be preaching whenever they're not doing something else, priests who are set to preach, and the check's namesake, a temple. More temples, more temple checks. If you have an awake God, an active Prophet, and six temples, you're generating 8 temple checks per turn; each check has a chance to increase your Dominion with a strength based on your Dominion score (to quote a thread I found: "Temple checks from temples are based on starting dominion. Temple checks based on the presence of your god and prophet are based on current dominion (start plus (temples/5).") Blood Sacrifice is such a Big Deal because it lets you rev this process up to an amazing speed. Each priest assigned to sacrifice blood slaves can sacrifice a certain number per turn - one per rank of Holy, I believe, with certain items like the Jade Knife adding more (2/turn in the case of the Jade Knife). Each blood slave sacrificed in this fashion is worth - again, according to some message board posts, I could be wrong - two temple checks apiece. So an H3 priest with a Jade Knife brings some slaves to a temple, cuts the hearts out of five of them, and now he's causing ten temple checks that turn, plus one for the Temple itself. Two or three priests start sacrificing, and, well... In effect, you're using up some non-renewable resources (blood slaves) to get multiple turns' worth of temple checks made in a single turn. This has been brought to you by four minutes with Google and some page-skimming, so again, I apologize if there are any misconceptions in here, but this seems to be the gist of it.
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Feb 2, 2017 11:31
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As far as I know that's correct. Blood Sacrificing is insanely efficient at brute-forcing temple checks.
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Feb 2, 2017 15:07
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I ALSO do not play Dominions, but a couple of little bits of trivia to add are that Dominion candles are added to the province that generated them unless a check based on how much Dominion is already there says the candle should flow out to a surrounding province. The more candles of Dominion in a province, the more likely the newly-generated candle is to be moved into an adjacent province, where the check is repeated until all candles have settled. Again, this could have changed some from Dom3, but that's my understanding. There's also a hard cap on candles of Dominion in a province (about ten, I think? But don't quote me on that bit). As I was corrected earlier, Dom4's chance for a Temple check succeeding is also different from Dom3, where each level of innate Dominion gave a flat %10 chance for the temple check to succeed (which also means you could die on turn three or so if you had Dominion lower than four and bad luck). Apparently that's been boosted to be something like a %50 default chance of success with an extra %5 per level of Dominion in Dom4, so low-Dominion players aren't AS likely to be crushed by blood-sacrifice nations early on simply because they have no reserve of friendly candles. I believe, if memory serves, that a scout with holy levels (or possibly the spy trait?) can tell you what the enemy Dominion level in a province is, so if you see a remote temple in a blood-sac nation suddenly surrounded in maximum Dominion, you know poo poo's Going Down. Units with the Inquisitor trait can reduce enemy Dominion in a province, if I'm not mistaken, and units with the Heretic trait reduce ANYONE'S dominion in their province. I can't think of any strategies that explicitly use these mechanisms for Dominion control off the top of my head, but again, that could be lack of familiarity. Often units with Heretic also have Unrest or other malus-causing traits that make them useful for injecting into enemy provinces to piss people off, and some units with traits like Inquisitor also have Tax Collector or patrol bonuses that make them useful for strategies that min-max income (or for reducing unrest when blood hunting). All this means that you might already have such units on hand and they could help blunt the damage from neighboring Blood powers trying to Domkill you. Shady Amish Terror fucked around with this message at 15:44 on Feb 2, 2017 |
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Feb 2, 2017 15:42
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A few little things about temple checks, according to the ingame dominon information you get when clicking on a temple, awake pretender gods get 3 temple checks not 1, and 1 of those is always a 100% check regardless of dominion. Also aperently your capital has a extra temple check on top of the temple it starts with. Thrones of assention also give one or more temple checks each which can add a not insignificant number depending on how many are in the game.
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Feb 2, 2017 17:05
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Yeah, the fun part here is that, unless I'm misremembering, How are u is also keeping the Throne of the Pantokrator in reserve, and when he finally claims that the game basically turns into a race against time for everybody else.
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Feb 2, 2017 17:17
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If you horror mark a vampire lord and then kill it, thus triggering immortality, does the vampire lord retain the horror mark? I'm just imagining mass horror marking as a way to annoy someone that is spamming vampires.
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Feb 2, 2017 18:34
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Pash posted:If you horror mark a vampire lord and then kill it, thus triggering immortality, does the vampire lord retain the horror mark? I'm just imagining mass horror marking as a way to annoy someone that is spamming vampires. Yes. Horror marks are absolutely permanent, no matter what.
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Feb 2, 2017 18:41
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Once Their gaze locks onto you, there is no escaping it.
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Feb 2, 2017 18:44
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Oh, absolutely. This gives you fun adventures like seeing your horror-marked pretender dying to horrors, coming back, dying to more horrors and coming back, dying to more horrors 
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Feb 2, 2017 18:52
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Do horrors strike before vampires would get to move and attack? If so mass horror spam seems like a fun somewhat solution as the vampire player would never know how many of them would actually make it or be horrored to death first.
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Feb 2, 2017 19:03
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One more thing about blood saccing and why it makes it so incredibly powerful. A non blood saccing nation has priests that can only preach so high. If there is no temple then the priest preaches the candles up to their Holy level (which is why you hear H1-3 priests). Having a temple doubles that limit. Once you hit the cap the nation's temple checks are the only way to bring the dominion up to max 10, priests don't help anymore. With blood saccing that goes out the window. Spilled blood is a successful check even past the priests Holy level. Because of this a non blood saccing nation can only have priests preach defensively against enemy dominion. Only built temples, prophets and God's can push candles into enemy territory. Blood saccing is all offensive candles. Eventually it is like a game of risk where you have 4 armies versus an attacking 80 army. This is because the priests blood saccing behind the front lines have the candles "settle" as far as possible forward because your inner empire should all be 10 candle dominion by this point in the game.
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Feb 2, 2017 19:29
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It seems to me that while you could horror mark a vamp lord it wouldn't really do much good, since the whole strategy behind vamps seems to be that you mass them like no tomorrow. So even if you get one badly marked vamp lord, there are more where he came from.
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Feb 2, 2017 19:41
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Cerebral Bore posted:It seems to me that while you could horror mark a vamp lord it wouldn't really do much good, since the whole strategy behind vamps seems to be that you mass them like no tomorrow. So even if you get one badly marked vamp lord, there are more where he came from. That's why you don't mark one lord, you use poo poo like Astral Geyser to mark all of them.
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Feb 2, 2017 19:45
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Cerebral Bore posted:It seems to me that while you could horror mark a vamp lord it wouldn't really do much good, since the whole strategy behind vamps seems to be that you mass them like no tomorrow. So even if you get one badly marked vamp lord, there are more where he came from. Ya, this would only work if a significant number of their vampires were horror marked.
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Feb 3, 2017 15:32
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Libluini posted:That's why you don't mark one lord, you use poo poo like Astral Geyser to mark all of them. Then they just become that much more of a suicide unit.
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Feb 3, 2017 16:44
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Cathode Raymond posted:So you're saying that because of bird shenanigans and animal armies, the world could not decide if a sea of murderous vampires was a bad thing or not? ...and its all a metaphor for the 2016 election, yeah.
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Feb 3, 2017 19:32
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Libluini posted:That's why you don't mark one lord, you use poo poo like Astral Geyser to mark all of them. Unless I'm mistaken that only works if the other player is dumb and keeps his lords bunched up.
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Feb 3, 2017 19:48
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Cerebral Bore posted:Unless I'm mistaken that only works if the other player is dumb and keeps his lords bunched up. Discounting the possibility of the enemy's stupidity is a good way to let them get away with it, though. 
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Feb 3, 2017 19:54
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Cerebral Bore posted:Unless I'm mistaken that only works if the other player is dumb and keeps his lords bunched up. If you can bring a dozen mages who can cast a spell to a fight and script them to cast it three or four times each, you can overcome your enemy's dispersal of their guys. I doubt this is a foolproof approach, but most things in Dom4 can be countered in some way or another. The game is about reacting to your enemy's reaction to your previous reaction to their previous action, ad nauseum, until it's over because someone grabbed enough thrones the end.
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Feb 3, 2017 20:23
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