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Ramc posted:Accurate.
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Apr 8, 2017 00:57
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Asehujiko posted:I'd like to hear about these weirdly set up factories, it reminds me of Dwarf Fortress succession LP's where at some point a player finds an unlabelled lever that kills whoever is working in a specific station but none of the previous players can remember how that actually got formed. Not inaccurate. EDIT: quote:[20:21] <Morrow> that site is my blood/summons factory, with the vamps Ramc fucked around with this message at 02:04 on Apr 8, 2017 |
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Apr 8, 2017 01:01
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Army of commanders worked for how are u 
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Apr 8, 2017 02:24
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Given How are u is now mostly using large vampire stacks, and Bogarus seems to have been gearing in that direction + mass Bane Lord thugs, I'm seeing a potential issue in one of their plans - and it's called who reaches Thaumaturgy 9 and/or efficiently employs a certain spell sitting there first. It's called Undead Mastery, likely out of a sabbath/communion, backed by Rune Smashers and whatever other penetration equipment is available. And yes, it does exactly what it sounds like it does. 
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Apr 8, 2017 05:13
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And for those of you who haven't played Dom4, understand that a player burning out on a normal game is pretty typical in the late game. This is not a normal game. Mo Money is so much worse because instead of having a few armies, each with agonizing levels of micromanagement for them and their supply chain, you have one for pretty much every province on the battle line. The time investment required is appalling - and most of it is sheer drudgery since the interesting decisions are a mere fraction of the turn process!
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Apr 8, 2017 07:45
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Idea: Less Money game to spare those poor poor players from having to click all the things.
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Apr 8, 2017 10:10
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Better yet, combine it with Bad Draft rules. Games will take forever when some people are going to have nations so terrible they can't order an attack on a neighboring territory until turn three or four, but the individual turns WILL go very fast!
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Apr 8, 2017 10:52
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Caelum News Network presents: More Caelum turns! Caelum Turn 74 This turn, Mictlan falls. Also Mictlan's pretender. And with Pangaea eating his underwater-provinces, that's another AI nation off the map. From now on, only the Human shall be our enemy! Caelum Turn 75 War preparations for the inevitable conflict with Bogarus continue. Also some comedy ensues because I accidentally send some reinforcements to one of Bogarus provinces instead of mine. I also start to notice I forgot to actually move the Pale Ones meant for sieging duty last turn. Luckily Pangaea still honors the triple alliance and doesn't just shove my 2-3 mages strong sieging army off that one underwater province I could actually manage to claw myself into. Now if Pangaea keeps staying on the right side, I'll actually gain a foothold under the ocean! (Not that it means anything now that Pangaea is everywhere down there, but eh. At least Pangaea isn't a problem to throw out with some preparations. This of course has to wait until after Bogarus has been dealt with.) Fake edit: Sorry for my slow posting schedule, it comes from past me creating wonderfully huge recordings (turn 76 is 50+ minutes raw footage, for example), which means I either have to talk for hours to make a video, or try to cut a lot. Which also takes time, gently caress. (I really didn't plan this out well.) Anyway, I promise to close the gap to How are u next week, honestly! Last turns
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Apr 9, 2017 15:21
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Let's Play Dominions 4! (I really didn't plan this out well)
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Apr 9, 2017 17:33
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How are u posted:Let's Play Dominions 4! (I really didn't plan this out well)
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Apr 9, 2017 18:55
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Turn 80 Turn 80 begins with another global message from Bogarus / Ramc:  Ramc is a very emotive player so this is fun, clearly he’s unhappy about taking over a nation in a game just to get gang-banged by two thirds (soon to be three) of the other remaining players. He seems to be threatening to blow up the world, which could result in him doing one or more of several options. The first thing that comes to mind is casting Astral Corruption, a high level Blood global spell that basically fucks anybody who doesn’t have Blood magic. He could be going to cast Burden of Time, or Foul Air, or Utterdark, all three globals that make life miserable for everybody. I guess we’ll have to wait and see…  The Might of Zionism casts Gift of Health, and it sticks!! We have successfully stolen the global from Bogarus, and there is much rejoicing. Now the pesky and annoying lightning bolts coming from The Wrath of God won’t be -nearly- as harmful, because all of our units within our Dominion get +10% HP per candle of Dom. It also heals afflictions over time, which is great.  The current Global board. You can see we also summoned Vampires, goats, Golems, sent some Horrors, and Teleported some Golems as well. We also summoned our 6th and final Demon Lord!   Buer is one of the more iconic Demon Lords, he’s a very powerful Fire mage who auto-casts the spell Heat From Hell at the start of each battle, and I am sure some situation will present itself in which his special skills can be put to use. We have now captured all of the Demon Lords, much like Pokemon. I’m setting Pazuzu and Ashmedai to cast the Blood 9 mass demon-summoning spells to start building an army of demons.  The Horrors we hurled at the Bogarussian provinces of The Banded Hills and Utevania did their jobs and eradicated the PD in the province. They didn’t catch any Bogarus armies or mages moving to possibly break our sieges, though. One more type of Greater Horror appeared in the battles:  The Gore Tide Horror is a loving beast and can beat the poo poo out of non mage-supported army, I think it is terribly cool. So, on to battles. First things first: Bogarus did -not- strike back. Our sieging armies didn’t get hit by anything, and that worries me. No Vampire squad flew out to counter-attack, no army of thugged Golems or Bane Lords appeared (Ramc mentioned on IRC that he too started building thugged out Golems), our Vamp armies didn’t even get hit by Flames from the Sky, which is a high level evocation spell that hurls powerful fireballs at an enemy army and which would have been very effective against our massed, Fire-vulnerable Vampires. So I don’t know what’s up, but it makes me think that something even worse is coming next. Ramc did mention that he clowned all over one of Pangaea’s armies with his Bane Lord thug squad, so I know he’s up to something. Well, the only thing we can do is see what happens next. Another bit of good news re: our sieging armies is that our Dominion is slowly starting to spread into those besieged provinces! We have a couple of candles in each Bogarussian province excepting Gryphon Rock, the Throne province. We’re continuing our policy of Blood Saccing from every single province possible, and I’m also going to summon up some more of those H2 Hashmal angelic beings that have the Inquisitor trait. Now, battles! First we see that our massive army of Gibborim and Levite Zealots stomped into Bogarus’ province of Mushwood, annihilating the PD.  Not an exciting battle. The army also instantly cracked the gate of the fort, but I’m not going to attempt storming until I know what’s inside. This army is kind of sitting out as a decoy, I won’t be terribly upset if it gets annihilated because that would free up a lot of money to make more mages. At the moment its job is just to give Bogarus one more thing to worry about. We scouted Bogarus storming a Ragha fort. We’ve seen Bogarus do this several times over the last dozen or so turns so I’m sure nothing interesting will happen. Here’s the Bogarus force:  Interesting, no mages… And the tiny Ragha defense force is pretty much nothing but mages, including 3 Flame Spirits. Bogarussian heavy cavalry bravely rush through the gate:  And run straight into a couple of tanky Fire Elementals and dozens of summoned skeletons.  The spell Flame Eruption is fantastic at close range. We’ve seen this song and dance before; the Flame Spirits begin to drop evocations onto the cavalry with gusto. Powerful, mid-range Falling Fires along with -extremely- strong, short-range Flame Eruption spells carve through the cavalry like a hot knife through butter. The cavalry are brave, probably to their detriment. They take hideous casualties and finally break, fleeing the field.  Flee!  The battle report is pretty much “WhyWeDon’tUseArmiesWithoutMagesAfterYearOne.png” Maybe 8 of Bogarus’ A2S1 Astrapelagist mages communioned up to throw some Thunder Strikes could would have punched through the Ragha defense and won this battle for Bogarus.  Finally, our scout pops inside the sieged Bogarus fort in Fas Dir to see what’s inside:  Looks like there are 17 of the aforementioned Astrapelagists:  And 9 Occultists:  Plus a bunch of infantry chaff. This is going to suck. That’s enough mages to really make storming the fort a nasty experience, if Ramc takes the time to script them correctly. What I would do is form a communion that allowed me to cast Storm on round 1, negating the flying of the lesser Vampires. From there he could throw Thunder Strikes, Solar Rays, and communion up some of the Occultists to sling Fire and Blood spells. Ugh. I’m not going to storm this fort next turn, we’re going to sit and summon more lesser Vampires and allow our Dominion to grow stronger in the province. I want to be 100% sure that any Vampires I send in will not die a perma-death. Once our Dominion is at 5 or so we’ll just send Vamps in until we beat down the defense through attrition. That’s it for battles for the turn, let’s look at our awesome events!   How fortunate! It’s not the end of the world but we did have 3 or 4 guys in Gath forging important gear each turn, and now those duties have to be farmed out to others until we can rebuild the Lab. So that’s pretty much it for the turn. We are not storming any of the forts we are sieging next turn. All of the gates are cracked except for the Throne province of Gryphan Rock. I want to wait for our Dominion strength to grow before risking the Vampire hordes any more than they are right now.  The battlefront.  These massive Pangaean armies make me nervous. I am very curious to see what Bogarus does next turn, either directly to our sieging armies or indirectly via some world-loving global. I think that just about anything will be manageable save for the loss of Arcane Nexus. If the Nexus falls so will our chances of winning this game. Also, Mictlan was eliminated this turn. RIP in piss.  
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Apr 11, 2017 02:52
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Isn't holding four out of five globals the sort of thing that might rally reasonable opponents against you if they realize you've suddenly grabbed that much of the magical sphere? Also, with regards to casting new globals when there are five already present, does it automatically challenge the weakest present hostile global? A random hostile global? Or is there a chance it could actually unseat one of your own?
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Apr 11, 2017 06:11
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PurpleXVI posted:Isn't holding four out of five globals the sort of thing that might rally reasonable opponents against you if they realize you've suddenly grabbed that much of the magical sphere? It should, but then again vampire swarms combined with a blood sac nation should have as well. People really aren't paying attention any more in this game. If global slots are full, it randomly picks one to test a newly cast one against, without regard for who owns it.
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Apr 11, 2017 06:25
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yeah in the last couple dominions LPs i've read just having 2 of the 5 globals was a reason for people to look askew at you.
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Apr 11, 2017 06:29
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Reasons to have your nation become everyone's target of choice: Massive blood sac. Vampire swarms. Massive blood sac AND vampire swarms (+2). Massive demon swarms. Owning more than one global. Owning four out of five globals (+3). Owning one of the economics engines (birds, Astral Nexus, Wish engine, etc) Owning a powerful magic discount site. Owning multiple powerful magic discount sites. Being the largest nation. Being the richest nation. Being the nation with the most Dominion. Being an infamous player. Casting one of the 'gently caress you' globals. There are other reasons, but those are some of the relevant ones I can think of this game. It's kind of amusing because ramc qualifies for maybe four of those conditions and howareu qualifies for...nearly all of them, which should again demonstrate that Diplomacy is the most powerful school of magic in Dominions. Howareu is in a VERY good position as of this turn, provided they don't get backstabbed by everyone at once and lose patience fighting an all-fronts war.
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Apr 11, 2017 06:36
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who is still alive?
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Apr 11, 2017 06:41
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sebmojo posted:who is still alive? Pangaea, Bogarus, and Caelum along with ourselves. Only four remain.
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Apr 11, 2017 14:23
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Shady Amish Terror posted:Reasons to have your nation become everyone's target of choice: Well, we are definitely not the largest or richest nation. We aren't quite the nation with the most Dominion either, I believe we are in a tight 2nd place tie with Bogarus right now. We don't have massive demon swarms (though Se'irim are demons), and we only have a single discount site (Thaumaturgy, from the Throne of Sorcery). However, you're 100% right in that Vampires + Blood Sac should = murder that player. Owning Nexus should also = murder that player. I'm quite frankly extremely surprised that Pangaea and Caelum haven't allied with Bogarus to murder us. I have been beating the war drums against Bogarus for probably like 30 turns now, so my diplomancy has been extraordinarily effective.
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Apr 12, 2017 01:16
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Strategically for Pan though, Bogarus has a blood discount site nearby. Taking that means that he could easily get into blood in a big way and corrupt his way into negating some of your other advantages.
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Apr 12, 2017 02:30
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Turn 81 Turn 81 begins with another fun message from Bogarus:  Ramc is trying to turn the other nations against me, obviously. That’s OK, I would be doing the same thing if I were in his shoes. I am -hoping- that Pangaea and Caelum don’t decide that I’m the bigger threat. Caelum I am not worried about, Libluini is, in my experience, a pretty steadfast player. I’ve been paranoid about Pangaea / Afrosquirrel since like year 2 of the game so I kind of expect a betrayal at some point. However, I think that one point we have in our favor is that it is a lot harder to convince somebody to leave you alone and instead go hit the other guy when that person is currently beating you. If Caelum, Pan, and I can put enough hurt on Bogarus that we start to visibily win then I think we’ll be safe until Bogarus is dead and his territory divided. We hit level 8 in both Conjuration and Alteration this turn. Conjuration 8 gives us access to summoning the Elemental Royalty and several other powerful creatures. We may end up summoning some Fairy Queens, or we may not. Alteration 8 gives us some sweet battlefield buffs like Ground Army, a spell that gives an entire army Lightning Resistance. For now we’re pushing hard to Alteration 9 and Wish. Well look at that, A Dire Portent. One of our globals was dispelled:    Pangaea's new forest friends attack some random AI Ragha poo poo. Looks like Pan knocked out our Eternal Pyre with a big, fat casting of Enchanted Forests. Enchanted Forests wasn’t a big deal when Man put it up, so it shouldn’t be a big deal now as long as we can maintain our Dominion strength. Still, that’s a very rude thing for Pan to do! As long as he remains a part of the anti-Bogarus alliance, however, I’ll put up with it. We summon the normal stuff we do every turn, and two of our Demon Lords cast some of the sweet Blood 9 spells that get you a big chunk of demons for a discount price. Pazuzu, in particular, summoned up a bunch of Storm Demons:  These are often regarded as the very best of the Demonic troops available. They’re tough, Ethereal, have a huge power boost in a Storm, and hurl lightning bolts kind of like Watchers. If you can mass these fuckers they’ll put a world of hurt on an enemy, so that’s what Pazuzu is going to do for a while. We sent more Horrors at various Bogarus provinces this turn and they generally clowned a bunch of PD. One Gore Tide Horror was defeated by a squad of 60~ of Bogarus’ cavalry archers, which kind of sucked. Battle time! Caelum has joined the war!  Caelum stomps some unfortunate PD.  Bogarus' surprisingly robust Heavy Cavalry charge straight into a block of bird-men. Libluini said that he invaded something like 7 provinces this turn, with more to come next turn. That’s a pretty impressive Offensive, if he’s not exaggerating. Hopefully Caelum’s entry into the war will convince Pangaea to stick it out and help put down dangerous Bogarus for good. Check out this message re: The Wrath of God:  Gift of Health is really helping! You can see that Wrath of God still struck hundreds of our units, but the increased HP pools thanks to Gift of Health made a single lightning bolt strike a -lot- less deadly. I am extremely pleased. We’ve cracked the gates of every Bogarus province we have under siege. We still need to ping inside those forts to get an idea of what to expect, and scouts are moving to those provinces to do so. I should have sent scouts earlier so we wouldn’t have to waste another turn. In the besieged province of Fas Dir our Dominion strength has increased to 5, so I feel comfortable sending some Vampires in to make a moderate attempt to storm the fort. We’re sending 6 or 7 Vampire Lords and like 30 lesser Vampires into the fort to see how they do. I’ll be very pleasantly surprised if they take it, but I’ll be happy if they even just manage to kill some of the defenders. We are also going to attack a new Bogarussian province next turn. Our tremendous Dom-pushing has pumped a lot of our candles into the province of The Cracked Earth, so we're going to send a handful of Vampire Lords and lesser Vampires over to attack it. The Cracked Earth is especially interesting to us because it is a Wasteland province. Currently we only own one Wasteland type province, Javal Kish, which is also the only location in our empire where we can summon Se'ir. I imagine you can figure out why we'd love to have a second Wasteland, one smack in the middle of our battlefront with Bogarus.   Bogarus / Ramc still hasn’t retaliated against us, but on IRC Ramc did say that he’d prepared a counter-attack and it would possibly be coming next turn. I’m curious to see what it will be. What’s really got me paranoid here are these scouting reports from Bogarussian provinces that Pangaea had put under siege:  A single Pan?  A single Dryad??! Pan’s pulled his giant armies back and left a token force sieging several of these territories. Now, there are legitimate tactical reasons to do something like this, but it makes me antsy. I would really like to try and chat with Afrosquirrel and see what he’s doing, but I haven’t been able to catch him on IRC lately. We’ll see how things shake out next turn…
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Apr 12, 2017 02:36
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My prediction: Ramc manages to turn Pan against Howareu, but still gets eaten by Gath and Caelum. Caelum gets more of the spoils from the war since Gath is busy fending off Pan, and winds up clowning Gath and Pan to win the game. It's secretly been Libuini's LP all along!
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Apr 12, 2017 02:43
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You are definitely going to see some poo poo before this all done.
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Apr 12, 2017 02:57
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Ramc posted:You are definitely going to see some poo poo before this all done. 
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Apr 12, 2017 03:07
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L.P. is really heating up. I am a huge RAMC fanboy, I am glad he subbed in. I truthfully think it would have been another stomp had he not come in.
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Apr 12, 2017 03:49
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Well, I wasn't entirely wrong on the demons thing either. Summoning more demons is one of the incredibly obvious things to do with powerful blood mage demons, and lo and behold.  This could definitely be...interesting. I can think of a few ways this could shake out (movement traps with stealth preaching to decimate vampire armies, scorched earth tactics, teleporting a massive murderball), but none of them feel like the right answer, so I'm really eager to see how this goes.
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Apr 12, 2017 04:28
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I feel like this game is on a relatively short timer if howareu is actually blood saccing from every province at once while having the throne of the pankocrator. What does the dominion chart look like?
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Apr 12, 2017 04:33
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CNN presents More Caelum-turns! Caelum Turn 76 Caelum Turn 77 Both turns together are just more preparations for the war against Bogarus. Also I finally get my last bunch of Pale Ones into the ocean. This time only for sieging duty on that one underwater-fort I could secure before Pangaea rushed everything else down there. Another highlight: I apologize to Bogarus for accidentally marching some clowns into one of this provinces, then send him 10 air gems as a gesture of good will and called them back. One turn later a hail of Seeking Arrows goes down and kills all leaders of that clown shoe corps. Motherfucker. (At least this means the now leaderless units are hanging around for another turn, making that fort useless for recruitment a little bit longer.) In hindsight I don't know what's weirder, Bogarus shooting those gems straight back at me or me being dumb enough to send gifts to my mortal enemies. If time travel was possible, I'd have some serious questions to past me from last year. Turn back before its too late!
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Apr 12, 2017 14:48
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Libluini posted:Another highlight: I apologize to Bogarus for accidentally marching some clowns into one of this provinces, then send him 10 air gems as a gesture of good will and called them back. Pffffffttthhahahahahahaha. I mean, it's not quite cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, but that is a hilarious cycle of rudeness.
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Apr 12, 2017 15:04
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Don Corleone, please accept these bullets by way of apology for me kicking your dog. Thank you.
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Apr 12, 2017 16:15
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Turn 82 Turn 82 begins once more with a global message from Bogarus:  Looks like he’s feeling a little down, and I am hoping that this indicates that his attempts to break up the Gath-Pangaea-Caelum triumvirate have failed. As I mentioned in the previous turn’s post, when players smell blood in the water and take a successful bite out of a weakened nation there isn’t much in the way of diplomacy that will stop them. One of the messages in the “magic phase” section of our message list for the turn contains a report from Fas Dir, one of Bogarus’ provinces that we have been sieging and in particular the one into which we sent some Vampires to storm the fort this turn:  Well! Looks like Bogarus did finally decide to hurl destruction at our forces by casting Flames From the Sky at our Vampire army.  According to the message it only killed 1 unit! That’s got to be a little disheartening for Bogarus to read, but the message is deceptive. Because the army was mainly Vampires, and Vampires are weak to Fire damage, it actually killed a loving lot of them, but they all just respawned in our cap:  All of the Vampires at the top of the list were nuked by Flames From the Sky. Also, notice the huge stack of Se'irim we've slowly been marching from the far East of our empire. I am hoping, though, that the discouraging report combined with the expensive cost of the spell (30F!) will keep Bogarus from using it much more often. It’s brutal against Vampires, even with the extra HP from Gift of Health. We scouted several battles this turn. First we see Bogarus send a small infantry contingent to break the siege of one of their forts:  Breaking the siege. 85 Peshti City Guard vs 1 Pan equipped to Earthquake:  A single Earthquake trap. And the results are pretty lackluster for Pangaea:  It's not very effective... Dead Pan, and Bogarus gets its province back. I’m a little bit miffed that Pan, from what we can see, is doing so poorly in this war. I’m pretty sure that a straight up Pangaea vs Bogarus war would end in a solid Bogarus victory based on what I’m seeing. We see a couple Caelum armies smash into Bogarussian territory, first in Gnome Peaks, where we can also see evidence that Caelum is summoning Tartarians:  Tons of bird men, but what's this in front?  A dormant Tartarian! And then in The Cracked Earth, where Caelum has an interesting army partially composed of a bunch of Ziz:  Bird-men leading even bigger birds.  The Ziz is kind of a weird and very niche summon. Remember that last turn we dispatched four Vampire Lords to The Cracked Earth to try and put the province under siege. I did this for two reasons: 1) the province has 7 of our candles, so the Vampires were in no danger of perma-death, and 2) The Cracked Earth is a wasteland province, and if we take it we’ll have another location from which to summon Se’irim! Caelum’s army arrived first and effortlessly cleared the Bogarus PD, then our four Vampire Lords arrived and had to fight Caelum. Our Vampires start by summoning a bunch of skeletons, per usual:  The beginning of a friendly bump between allies. I figured we’d be fighting Bogarus PD so I didn’t script the Vampires to cast any of our good battlefield spells. Caelum’s army is full of Death mages in addition to the bird-men and Ziz, so they start summoning skeles of their own! The Ziz had been set to hold and attack, so on round 3 they fly across the field and attack the Vampire Lords:  The problem with Ziz is that they kind of suck. Their greatest asset is their Fear, which is super powerful on units because stacked Fear is devastating. Vampires, being undead, don’t give a gently caress about Fear, and neither do skeletons. The Ziz are fairly quickly butchered, and Caelum loses 50 Death gems worth of Ziz for zero gain:  Chop chop. However, all of those bird necromancers summoned up a big pile of undead, and our four Vampires would never be able to output enough of our own skeletons to match them. The Vamps are overrun and killed (temporarily), and Caelum wins the battle:  Caelum brought more necromancers   This was kind of a funny battle, I’m not upset and I don’t think Libluini is either. I let him know that I would like to own The Cracked Earth, and we’ll negotiate for it sometime in the future. That was the ‘fun’ battle of the turn, now let’s look at another battle, the most important battle of the turn. Bogarus struck back, and he did it in a very flashy, very “don’t gently caress with me, bro” way. Our giant army of Gibborim and Levite Zealots sieging the Bogarus fort in Mushwoods was the target:  Holy warriors sieging the vile Bogarussian fortress! Bogarus’ army is a communion of Astrapelagists and Occultists, with some Foulspawn creatures to act as blockers.  A classic set-up: a communion with hardy chaff to screen the mages.  I am guessing Bogarus got these guys through an event. There was also this fine fellow hanging out down in a corner where I almost missed him:   gently caress. This is a Master Enslave casting Golem, for sure. Astral 7, and kitted out with Artifact gear. Take a look at these:   The Dimensional Rod is an Artifact Astral boosting item that slowly drives the wielder insane. Golems, I believe, are immune to this. The Armor of Virtue is a really useful item that automatically teleports the wearer back to the capitol province the moment he takes a point of damage. Master Enslave is one of the ultimate, end-game battlefield spells. Nothing will quite gently caress up an enemy's careful scripting and battle plan like Dominating a shitload of his troops and mages. It has an insane casting requirement of Astral 8, and costs 8 Pearls to actually use. Generally the only time you see it deployed is with a large Communion, but this is Mo Money and unlimited resources can be spent building mages with which to cast even the most powerful magics.  The battle starts and our massed infantry are blessed and begin trudging across the field. Bogarus’ mages communion up, then the Astrapelagists begin to cast Thunder Strike (terrible idea) and the Occultist masters summon skeletons.  Our sacred infantry surge forward, meeting the horrible foul-spawn head-on!  An Astrapelagist explodes himself with a well-placed Thunderstrike. On our round two one of our booster wearing, Astral random Kohen Gadol casts Antimagic, a spell which boosts the MR of all friendly units by +4:  I'm so happy I scripted this. Bogarus’ Golem casts Power of the Spheres, and then in a bit of luck on round 2 chooses to engage one of our Corpse Candles (auto summoned at the start of the battle by a Lantern Shield) in melee. This gives our troops just one more battle round turn to march down the field, moving them further away from our vulnerable mages in the rear.  Power of the Spheres is a personal buff that increases all magic levels by 1.  Sometimes the corpse-candles auto-summoned by Lantern Shields can be real life savers. On round 3 the Golem casts Master Enslave. In the following screens I’ve enabled the battle replay visual option that highlights the ground beneath each square of units the color of the side they belong to. Boom:  Ramc:  I’d say that Golem got maybe 1/5 or 1/6 of our whole army with the Master Enslave. He mainly dominated Levite Zealots (weak, bros, weak), but picked up a Gibbor here and there. Bogarus’ foulspawn blockers break and rout the same turn that our men are dominated, so our forces spend the next 4 or 5 rounds killing their own comrades before they’re finally able to resume their march towards the opposite side of the field. The Bogarussian Occultists summoned a lot of skeletons in the meantime, but our Bless lets our troops persevere, push through, and slaughter most of the mages. The Golem, upon receiving the first nick from one of our Gibbor’s sword, instantly is teleported back to Bogarus’ capitol, safe and sound and ready to wreak havoc another day. It was a bloody battle:  Foul-spawn flee in the background as brother fights brother in a massive, chaotic melee.  The traitors are slain and our forces resume their march towards Bogarussian mages.  Oof. Alright. That Golem was intimidating. Master Enslave is intimidating, and that Golem was sending a message. Master Enslave is a fantastically good Defensive weapon, it is actually not super difficult to set up a Master Enslave communion with a moderately strong Astral mage (plus boosters). It becomes a lot scarier to advance armies when they may face the possibility of being hit (maybe multiple times!) by Master Enslave every turn. We don’t have a choice, however. If we leave Bogarus alone he will win this game, he has the resources. We have to count on the fact that he’s being pressed from all sides, and that he won’t be able to bring enough of these weapons online before he’s overwhelmed. Master Enslave is also not very great at dominating high MR targets, thus Antimagic being an invaluable spell. The Golem death squads we’ve been building have MR that’s high enough that they should never be dominated. Vampire Lords start at MR 16, which is pretty good, so if they can get a cast of Antimagic each battle they’ll probably get taken very rarely at all. We can beat this, but we have to play smarter to do it. Ok! There was one more battle this turn, we stormed the fort in Fas Dir with Vampires:  No lesser Vampires! Fucker! That Flames From the Sky really hosed up our storming force! All of the 30~ lesser Vampires that were supposed to storm and act as distractors must have been wiped out by the fire, haha. Our Lords go in alone.  The defenders could form a powerful Communion. Six Vampire Lords face down 9 Occultists and 17 Astrapelagists, plus heavy infantry blockers, in a battle to the death. I watch in disbelief as Bogarus’ defending mages do nothing but spam low level buffs as the battle begins. They throw Body Ethereal all over their chaff infantry, which isn’t the worst choice but honestly it would make so much more sense to communion up 75% of the mages and let the other quarter cast buffs on those troops. The Lords summon skeletons, cast Rigor Mortis, and also cast Blood Rain to hit moral. As Bogarus’ infantry advance the mages start hurling Nether Darts, a really nasty Astral and Death evocation that Feebleminds any living target it strikes.  Skeletons advance under a withering hail of Nether Darts. Fortunately skeletons' job is to die  Body Ethereal may have been a mistake. Ethereal units can walk straight through castle walls, which is great when you are storming a fort but not so great when you are defending and want you troops to plug that gate tighter than a wine-cork. Bogarus’ infantry phase through their own defensive fortifications and meet the growing skeleton horde on the field. The skeletons can’t harm most of them, but they do inflict casualties on the ones that didn’t get turned Ethereal. Around this time a stray arrow fired from the fort towers manages to either kill or hurt hard enough to cause to flee the Vampire who had cast Rigor Mortis. The spell vanishes from the battlefield, which would be Very Bad for us except that at the same time the moral of Bogarus’ infantry breaks and they begin to rout!  Run away! With the blockers fleeing the battle it is only a matter of rounds before skeletons reach the exhausted mages and rip them to shreds. We’ve won our first victory against Bogarus, and taken our first prize: the province of Fas Dir!   Our newly won province doesn’t have any magic sites that give gems. Sad! It does have a gold mine (75g/turn), and this very fun little bonus site:  Well hello... The Eyes of God may have been snuffed out, but now we at least get to see half of the score graphs for as long as we hold this province! This update has become ridiculously big already, so I will go over the new graphs next turn. The rest of the turn is preparations. I send Golems to teleport to several of our sieging armies so that they can cast Antimagic in case Bogarus tries more Master Enslaving. All of the Vampires that died to Flames from the Sky in Fas Dir begin their flight back to the front from our capitol. I teleported a bunch of our Horror Seed Kohen Gadol to the Eastern side of our Empire, where they will now start Horror Seeding various Pangaean provinces. I want to start doing this early, because we’ll be going to war with Pan soon enough if we can beat Bogarus.  Pangaea, for your lovely effort you are hereby sentenced to Horror Seeding. Speaking of that, I had the opportunity to have a quick chat with Libluini on IRC, and he’s agreed to leave us a path into Bogarus’ territory. So, hopefully, no more army bumping. He also informed us that he’s doing very well against Bogarus way to the South, which is great news. Additionally, we tentatively agreed to form an Alliance against Pangaea for when Bogarus bites it. Inshallah we will be the last two standing in this game. Oh, one final thing. We’re empowering Sabba, the Sibyl of Hermon, one more time in Astral. Next turn we hit Alteration 9. Next turn we begin to Wish. How are u fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Apr 13, 2017 |
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Apr 13, 2017 00:37
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Finally.
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Apr 13, 2017 01:10
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Ha ha ha! Yes! YES!
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Apr 13, 2017 01:26
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Do you have an Alteration site that I missed, or is Nexus just giving you that many pearls?
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Apr 13, 2017 01:39
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About 7 years in, and now we got a game goin'. Hell yeah
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Apr 13, 2017 01:44
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The assault on Fas Dir feels like peak dominions. Everything went nuts.
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Apr 13, 2017 03:37
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Tulip posted:The assault on Fas Dir feels like peak dominions. Everything went nuts. If it's not, it's pretty close, yeah. No battle plan survives contact with the enemy and all that. I also appreciate the way that a Dominions LP kind of turns into a slog mirroring the original game, but it's sort of hilarious seeing how many army orders are being glibly glossed over every turn. I, again, don't play myself, but it's great reading these interesting, fascinating stories and knowing that for each eagerly-awaited update, there was a turn where every player involved had to script a few dozen armies against whatever resistance they were seeing, issue move orders, cast several spells, craft several items, assign gear to thugs and mages and commanders, individually move dozens of scouts, review the orders for each of possibly hundreds of mages and priests and scouts and commanders, coordinate all of that with an overarching national strategy...and pray to god you didn't accidentally stealth-move a key strategic unit instead of moving them with the army, or you didn't accidentally forget to give a key mage gems, or you didn't misclick your doom-stack into sure and certain death, or you didn't stampede a bunch of living units through terrain that can't support them, or you didn't see that tiny 1-pixel river that means your army's path is going to get cut off when winter ends, or you didn't script the wrong spell, or you didn't screw up and overspend your gems or gold loving up a future strategy, or you didn't just send immortal units into enemy dominion, et cetera.
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Apr 13, 2017 06:51
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The fuckup I always make is scripting teleportation then selecting the units and clicking somewhere they can't move, which cancels their orders, then wondering why they never showed up.
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Apr 13, 2017 06:57
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Dominions isn't a game where you fight other players, it's a game where the interface fights players and you fight the interface.
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Apr 13, 2017 07:07
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Shady Amish Terror posted:
It's A Lot. If I were to have tried to describe in detail all of the minutia that goes into taking each turn of this game at this point it would be...a lot of reading. The write-ups for most turns right now are 2+ single spaced pages, and I'm sure it would be more like 10 pages if I tried to comprehensively cover every little decision. Dominions!  e: I recognized that it would be insane to try to do that, so my focus for each turn is to ask "What are the most important things that happened this turn?" and "What do I need to include to keep a coherent game narrative moving forward?" Hopefully that's worked well! How are u fucked around with this message at 16:03 on Apr 13, 2017 |
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Apr 13, 2017 16:00
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The mircomanagement is absurd, but the interface really fights you too. If you misclick selecting a commander, the commander you just gave move orders to will likely now be set to defend.
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Apr 13, 2017 16:11
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