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Earthquakes, solar brilliance (blinds all living units, damages all undead and demons), flying units that kill the mages before they summon, killing the mages before they summon with earthquakes, etc.
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Mar 26, 2017 03:34
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You could always bring your own skeleton tide, too. I imagine they mostly cancel out.
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Mar 26, 2017 03:36
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Banishment spam is the classic anti-undead tool. Since it doesn't cost any fatigue to cast and even a mediocre priest can blast huge holes in a sea of skeletons, they'll eventually win the magic battle.
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Mar 26, 2017 05:08
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Assuming you give your own stuff fire protection, Fire Storm is another good one. This has the bonus effect of incinerating all vampires on the field extremely quickly too, since they're actually vulnerable to fire (take a significant amount of extra damage, and do not go out naturally once they start burning).
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Mar 26, 2017 05:32
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Yeah, most wide mid-to-lategame AoEs are a potential counter to skelespam; as seen, they can gum up the works significantly through sheer mass otherwise. While the above listed counters are all valid, the IDEAL solutions are the ones that take out the mages doing the casting, since the skeletons are just free chaffe and you'll constantly be swimming upstream against them until the casters stop. Vampire flight negates Earthquake, if I'm not mistaken, but anything else that blasts the entire battlefield or can at least reach into the back of the enemy formation is worth considering. The mod viewer lists Banishment as having a base range of 20, but I don't know how that translates into the usual battle encounter. It does get a nice hefty boost of +5 range per additional holy level (in addition to its great AoE of 4 that goes up by TWO per additional holy level), so if you've got ready access to H2 or even H3 priests, Banishment should clear wide swaths of skeletons and vampires.
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Mar 26, 2017 06:45
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Crazycryodude posted:I guess I never realized just how many skeletons you can spam out. How the hell would someone else fight a screen-filling ocean of them? AoE's and spells that nuke Undead specifically? Patience. Just let them make enough skeletons and victory will be yours... because above a certain army size, Dominions has a tendency to just melt down and crash to desktop on trying to process things, I learned this playing Ermor. 
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Mar 26, 2017 08:29
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CNN presents: New turns! Caelum Turn 71 Caelum's iron-hard wings are blasting the winds of storms into Mictlan's face. Also boring preparations for the next war. Caelum Turn 72 This turn was another victim of lazyness and nothing was recorded. Too bad! Caelum Turn 73 At this point Mictlan is basically done, and with the help of Pangaea, the preparations for the great war against Bogarus are nearing completion. Past turns
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Mar 26, 2017 13:54
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Turn 74 Turn 74 begins with the final breakthrough in Blood Magic. We have now hit Blood 9 and have access to a couple of the most interesting spells in the game. There wasn’t anything we -needed- at Blood 9, but there are things that could be useful or fun. For example, we can now cast the ritual spell Horror Seed and plant invisible horrors within enemies troops and mages from across the world. We can also cast the battle spells Infernal Prison and Claws of Kokytos, which are irresistible single-target spells that banish a unit to one of the infernal planes from which they will almost certainly never escape. We also get access to the Demon Lords, the most powerful demon mages you can summon in the game. Our god, The Might of Zionism, is going to try summoning a Demon Lord this turn. Maybe Bogarus has already gotten to them, but the spell does require 8 levels in Blood magic to cast, so it is likely that the only mage capable of doing so is our Pretender. Fingers crossed!  Ultimate power? Or have they already been bound? Notice anything in the first messages of the turn? There was no Dire Warning! Nobody cast a global last turn, the open slot on the global list went unnoticed! It seems that the other players of the game are not paying quite as close attention as we are, and that’s their problem now. Last turn we forged a Skull of Fire and a Flame Helmet for our Arch Devil, Igarak.  Our ticket to a massive Fire income. With F6 he can now attempt to cast Eternal Pyre, a Fire gem-gen global that will give us +20 F each month! I managed to put up and keep up Eternal Pyre in the first Mo Money game and those gems proved extremely useful in the late game. Hopefully the other nations still have yet to realize there is a free global slot, and we put Eternal Pyre up without issue next turn. Here's an interesting message:  Somebody tried to cast one of the Astral scrying spells upon our province of Star Peaks. If I remember right there are two very similarly named spells that do this, and one of them carries with it the risk of having what just happened, happen. The mage that cast the spell got his brains turned into mush: Feebleminded. The Demon Gate continues to rumble and cause low-level problems for the whole world:  We cast remote-search spells (nothing), summoned goats, wolves, and Vampire Lords. The Arcane Nexus netted us 119 Pearls this turn. We now have over 1000 Astral Pearls, and that’s enough to instantly reapply a max-strength Nexus if our current spell somehow gets taken down. I now feel safe enough to start spending those Pearls, so Sabba the Sybl, our goddess of Astral power, is going to start forging Rings of Sorcery. We’ll use them to build a small corps of Kohen Gadol capable of casting Horror Seed.  An insanely useful, yet expensive booster. Likewise, we are diverting research into Construction so we can get to Construction 7 in two turns. That will let us summon Golems, which cost Pearls and are going to be a very useful Thug/SC chassis for us. After that we’ll focus mainly on getting to Alteration 9, which gives us the mythical spell Wish. We didn’t engage in any battles this turn and only scouted a few others. We see Pangaea suicided a Black Harpy scout into one of Caelums provinces for some reason, probably a mis-click.  ?? We also see Bogarus run one of his massive communion + heavy cav armies into a Ragha province. I notice now that AI Ragha and Mictlan are very small indeed, each with just a handful of provinces remaining. They’ll be gone within 3 to 5 turns, I reckon, and then the real, final, end of the world wars are going to begin. Let’s be ready for them. Our Vampires arrived in Thorn Woods and are storming the fort again this turn. Next turn we should, ideally, take control of Man’s second to last province and have a brand new Treelord. The siege of Man’s capitol continues, with more lesser Vampires being created every turn. I think there are well over 400 of them now, but the gate has yet to crack.  We're getting that Treelord! Next turn: storming Thorn Woods, again! Summoning a Lord of Hell?
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Mar 27, 2017 03:53
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It's going to be...interesting seeing what the other players have in store, in comparison. Looking forward to that, and also to the Demon Gate possibly hilariously ruining the world (I don't know if it does that, but I can dream).
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Mar 27, 2017 05:06
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That's some nice, strong dominion there. Also, with regard to thrones, can there be more than one of the same throne in a given world?
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Mar 27, 2017 08:01
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No duplicate Thrones, but some of them are effectively identical in what they provide.
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Mar 27, 2017 18:39
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I've seen the game duplicate thrones before, but I couldn't tell you why. Maybe they set more level 1 thrones than the game has so they doubled up on a few.
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Mar 27, 2017 20:26
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Are the thrones randomly selected from a list of possible candidates?
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Mar 27, 2017 21:07
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No a markata selects them
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Mar 28, 2017 01:47
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Looking forward to seeing everyone's late game toys!
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Mar 28, 2017 02:12
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Turn 75 Turn 75 has arrived! This is it, this is the turn the LP goes live! It’s been a long, slow road to get to this point, hasn’t it dear reader? But, we’ve done it together! The turn begins with a few successfully spell casts! Firstly, we successfully summoned a Demon Lord!  Success!  Demon Lords come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They're all certainly...unique. Geryon is an interesting unit. He’s a powerful Death, Nature, and Blood mage, a level 5(!) Heretic, and causes Misfortune and Unrest in the province he’s in. I don’t really have a plan for the Demon Lords we manage to snag, I wasn’t sure that there would be any to get to be honest. But I think now that Bogarus does not indeed have a high enough level Blood mage to summon them, so we’ll probably get most if not all of them. Geryon is going to sit and research for the moment, and we’ll forge some booster items for him eventually. I imagine he’ll be used to cast big ol’ battlefield spells. We also successfully cast Eternal Pyre! We are now pulling in +35 Fire gems a turn, pretty sweet. We’ll be using them to forge gear and summon Flame Spirits to accompany the Golem thug squads we’ll eventually be building.  Things are heating up!  Speaking of Golems, we’re one turn away from hitting Construction 7 and gaining the spell to summon them. We’ll start next turn! Then we are going to beeline for Alteration 9 and Wish. The Arcane Nexus pulled in 130 Pearls this turn, delicious. There were a couple of scouted battles of little import this turn. Ragha slams into Pangaea:  More pointless death. Bogarus storms another Ragha fort:  Bogarus continues to field massive armies of heavy cavalry backed by Air communions. Oh and this is interesting, Caelum attacks Bogarus:  It’s not a very…impressive force. I almost wonder if it wasn’t a mis-click on Caelum’s part. I guess we will see! Our one battle was Thorn Woods 2: Vampiric Boogaloo.  We're back! Here are our brave Vampires ready to fly up to the single, solitary Treelord and bind him to our ser-  Dogs!  These stupid chaff wolves could gently caress up our careful scripting  God drat it! I forgot that the Treelord starts every battle with 2d6 Direwolves, and it looks like he spent a turn or two summoning a bunch of regular wolves too. Our Vampires are scripted to Attack for one round to get them to fly up close, then spam Hellbind Heart. They fly right up into the wolves:  And proceed to spend several rounds dominating a bunch of loving dumb wolves:  :palm: Eventually the wolves rout, and, thankfully, I equipped the Vamps with enough slaves for them to continue to cast Hellbind Heart:  Here’s our free Treelord!  I don’t have any plans for it, and it can’t leave Thorn Woods, so it’ll probably sit around and be spooky for the rest of the game. Still, a Treelord that we have is one that others cannot. We cracked the gate in Man, finally. We’re sending a scout in next turn and we’ll have a look inside. Honestly, it’s possible that Man get domkilled before we get the chance to storm the fort. Man must have a meager handful of candles left in the world. If we do get the chance to storm the fort I’ll try to show off another potent battlefield spell in doing so.  The great Mannish war is nearly over. Finally, I'll leave you with a handful of turn 75 graphs:  Provinces  Gems  Research  Dominion
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Mar 28, 2017 02:50
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Three great powers colliding soon; might be cool. Still love that even as the playerbase dwindles, no one has attained the level of that early Dominion spike yet.
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Mar 28, 2017 03:25
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Look at that Bogarus research line. That's something you do not want to see, because he's doing that and deploying his battle communions.
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Mar 28, 2017 04:03
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Loxbourne posted:Are the thrones randomly selected from a list of possible candidates? They can be, or the map file can have fixed Thrones. Also I like how Howareu is third to Pan & Bogarus in almost every category. Gonna be an uphill struggle for those Vampires Except he;s got Nexus and Pantokrator Edit: I'm guessing Xib took dom10 starting, so he had a much easier time building big candles in individual provinces, even if they didn't spill onto as much of the map?
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Mar 28, 2017 04:11
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Shady Amish Terror posted:Still love that even as the playerbase dwindles, no one has attained the level of that early Dominion spike yet. Xibalba's insane Dom-push, as lain out on that graph, is truly nuts. I've never seen anything like it in any game I've played in. It honestly looks like Xibalba was on course to dom-kill the entire world if he'd only been left alone for 6, 8, 10 more turns? Remember that when we entered our first war with Xibalba, Pangaea told us that he was down to <10 candles in his whole empire.
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Mar 28, 2017 04:14
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wiegieman posted:Look at that Bogarus research line. That's something you do not want to see, because he's doing that and deploying his battle communions.
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Mar 28, 2017 04:15
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frankenfreak posted:I'd be more concerned with the latest turn. Bogarus it looks like a significant amount of researchers are doing something else now. More likely than not this means that Bogarus has just hit research level 9 in every school of magic. He's probably maxed out.
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Mar 28, 2017 04:18
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Considering the province negatives that the demon lord brings, I'd figure that you'd want to arm him up and hurl him at the front lines as fast as possible to get that stuff out of your own empire.
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Mar 28, 2017 09:35
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Pretty sure demon lords also have a small chance to rebel every turn.
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Mar 28, 2017 10:00
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Nanomashoes posted:Pretty sure demon lords also have a small chance to rebel every turn. I'm pretty sure you can trust the Demon Lord of Fraud
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Mar 28, 2017 18:16
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I wonder what Bogarus and Pan are thinking. On the one hand, devour the two weaker players and then do a final square off. On the other hand HAU is defensive oriented as hell, while Calum would be a bitch to attack because all of the flying raider poo poo they can pull. Very precarious.
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Mar 28, 2017 18:16
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Flavius Belisarius posted:I'm pretty sure you can trust the Demon Lord of Fraud How can you not trust the face of an elderly honest man?
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Mar 28, 2017 18:35
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A fun thing about Geryon being summoned is that while he is outside of Hell a certain type of magical item stops working. I think, it's dominions after all.
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Mar 28, 2017 19:18
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Flavius Belisarius posted:I'm pretty sure you can trust the Demon Lord of Fraud he's got a twinkle in his eye like old Mr Morrison who used to hand out sweets to good kids
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Mar 28, 2017 20:32
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Donkringel posted:I wonder what Bogarus and Pan are thinking. On the one hand, devour the two weaker players and then do a final square off. On the other hand HAU is defensive oriented as hell, while Calum would be a bitch to attack because all of the flying raider poo poo they can pull. Very precarious. You need to try to get one or both of them to be kingmaker. Put your rival into a two-front war. But without your lesser partner accidentally ending up with the goods
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Mar 28, 2017 20:52
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It's entirely possible to just straight win a two-front war against equally-matched powers due to the massive problem-space of the game, but diplomacy really is one of the most powerful weapons in Dominions.
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Mar 28, 2017 20:53
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SIGSEGV posted:A fun thing about Geryon being summoned is that while he is outside of Hell a certain type of magical item stops working. Can you expand on this? One of the best aspects of Dominions is the way the game connects up so much of its strange mythical logic.
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Mar 28, 2017 22:01
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There's an unique item with his name on it.
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Mar 28, 2017 22:20
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Donkringel posted:I wonder what Bogarus and Pan are thinking. On the one hand, devour the two weaker players and then do a final square off. On the other hand HAU is defensive oriented as hell, while Calum would be a bitch to attack because all of the flying raider poo poo they can pull. Very precarious. I don't get the geopolitics in general. How is Gath not public enemy #1 for everyone else right now? I mean, even if they're like "hordes of vampires, whatever," Arcane Nexus has been up for a long old time - isn't that like a declaration of war on everyone else? Or is it possible that Bogarus and Pan's positions are even stronger and we just don't know it?
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Mar 28, 2017 22:35
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There might be an issue with who goes first, how everyone gets there (assuming they don't have a border), and who is planning to stab them in the back as soon as they're invested.
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Mar 28, 2017 22:41
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Either the Bird Economy is so strong that Bogarus somehow feels safe from Gath, or a combination of good diplomancing and mutual distrust has paralyzed any possible coalitions.
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Mar 28, 2017 22:51
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Loxbourne posted:Can you expand on this? One of the best aspects of Dominions is the way the game connects up so much of its strange mythical logic. The Protection Of Geryon is a unique contract that will drag the killer of the bearer of the contract straight to hell so long as Geryon is in hell.
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Mar 28, 2017 22:56
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Dallbun posted:I don't get the geopolitics in general. How is Gath not public enemy #1 for everyone else right now? I mean, even if they're like "hordes of vampires, whatever," Arcane Nexus has been up for a long old time - isn't that like a declaration of war on everyone else? Or is it possible that Bogarus and Pan's positions are even stronger and we just don't know it? Pan and Bogarus both have higher gem incomes from provinces, and Bogarus likely has a staggering amount of off-the-books avian income of all kinds due to the way firebirds generate good events. I can't imagine what their magic item treasury looks like.
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Mar 28, 2017 23:00
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If there's one major obvious power, everyone who's competent will probably gang up on them (see also: the attempted world-Domkill earlier and how that went). If there's two major powers left, they'll eat any obviously weak neighbors before throwing against each other while all the little powers go AI or try to play kingmaker against the person eating them. If there's only and exactly three obvious major powers left, they'll probably all shuffle their feet for a good long while trying to make plans on how best to kill one of their neighbors slowly and one quickly and then try to get one of their neighbors to agree on that plan. In a situation where only one person has access to the graphs at any given time, it can be difficult to tell who's the biggest threat or easiest target at a glance, which is why scouting and good game knowledge is essential. Also remember I don't play this game, so take my second-hand observations with a grain of salt.
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Mar 28, 2017 23:01
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| # ? May 21, 2024 19:54 |
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Shady Amish Terror posted:It's entirely possible to just straight win a two-front war against equally-matched powers due to the massive problem-space of the game, but diplomacy really is one of the most powerful weapons in Dominions. Didn't TheDemon hold off two foes for like thirty turns in one of his games?
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Mar 29, 2017 00:02
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