|
Worms that Walk have DOUBLE immortality? How does that work?
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2017 11:00
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 11, 2024 12:42 |
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:Worms that Walk have DOUBLE immortality? How does that work? If they die in battle, they have a high chance to be reformed during battle and appear again, I think. Dang, this LP is giving me the itch to play Dominions again.
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2017 11:07
|
|
|
A 75% chance to reform on death at a random spot on the battlefield (for example directly beside the enemy mages). It also auto-generates flying bugs every turn that play havoc with enemy mage scripts. Plus enough nature magic to cast creeping doom, howl, storm of thorns and charm. We used to think they were crap, turns out they can potentially solo an army.
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2017 11:23
|
|
|
Cathode Raymond posted:I don't trust these new fangled nature worm vampires. Bugs and worms and stuff? Gross. Everyone knows all reputable vampires are of the walking-corpse variety. They're more like nature liches really.
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2017 13:46
|
|
Coolguye posted:because getting someone to the point of being able to cast it is really, really hard. it took a mo money game just to see it happen ONCE, forget the idea of having it happen multiple times in normal games. it's also very vulnerable in many situations, high magic resistance would have it burning it's One Weird Trick and wasting all of that mammoth investment. a couple of bane lords with magic resist gear would be able to plow through many vanguard armies and would disassemble that golem. That is why you give the golem the Armor of Virtue or have it cast ritual of returning. So that if some hero gets through the golem- and all that investment- goes back home to teleport into the next shitshow at leisure.
|
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2017 17:08
|
|
|
What's the fastest or cheapest path to a unit capable of casting Master Enslave, assuming you're up to the path level required in the requisite magic school? I'm assuming the Golem isn't exactly the fastest/cheapest way there, but chosen because it's a very sturdy chassis for your investment to avoid a single lucky arrow or assassin ruining it all?
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2017 17:49
|
|
|
The true joke is the golem decides working for a pretender god is dumb and goes off on his own and wins the ascension wars. (yes I am aware golems are mindless)
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2017 17:51
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:What's the fastest or cheapest path to a unit capable of casting Master Enslave, assuming you're up to the path level required in the requisite magic school? I'm assuming the Golem isn't exactly the fastest/cheapest way there, but chosen because it's a very sturdy chassis for your investment to avoid a single lucky arrow or assassin ruining it all? Probably a MA Pythium Arch Theurg that random'd to S4, wearing a hat and carrying a coin for +2 S, holding a Crystal Shield for +1 all paths in battle, leading a Communion of like 10 Theurg Communicants for +2 more paths in battle. If he's also carrying a Crystal Matrix (instant auto-cast Communion Master at start of battle) then he can even drop the spell on round one. That'd only cost like 50 gems worth of gear (and not all mandatory). If it's an S5 caster or you just want to use 20 communicants instead of 10 you can spend even fewer gems.
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2017 17:57
|
|
|
An S9 pretender. Lucking out on an S6 starspawn so you only need a cap and coin. Being Pythium and packing a shitload of communicants in there.
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2017 18:02
|
|
|
goatface posted:They're more like nature liches really. That's not much better  I don't trust bug and worm collectives to run a world government. I just don't. Maybe if it were a vermin pile, like rats and squirrels and rabbit and weasels and poo poo, I would be more open to the idea.
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2017 18:13
|
|
Cathode Raymond posted:That's not much better Be the change you want to see.
|
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2017 18:18
|
|
|
More Caelum poo poo Caelum Turn 80 This turn was a beast: 1 hour of scripting and sending armies into Bogarus. Even after cutting everything down to a more palatable size, it's still nearly half an hour long. Five provinces attacked in a single turn, and more armies are on the march for multiple follow-up attacks in the next turn. Now the long ordeal of preparing for war is over, and the long ordeal of conducting war has begun. Caelum Turn 81 + 82 And making this video was just bananas. The raw footage was around 90 minutes long. Even after cutting over half an hour of useless crap, it's still pretty drat close to a full hour. Again, most of the time is scripting, renaming, organizing and finally giving marching orders. Another wave of attacks falls on Bogarus, and since my armies are just nuts, I already sieged down multiple forts in the first turn of the attack, stormed them immediately and by turn 82 I'm sending in a third wave of attacks. The best part however? All this scripting and marching looked so samey in my recordings I only noticed after finishing my commentary that I had effectively cut together two different turns into one, giant video.  All the following recordings I made are a lot shorter though, so this shouldn't happen again. Back to the preparation phase.
|
|
#
?
Apr 23, 2017 20:14
|
|
|
Coolguye posted:because getting someone to the point of being able to cast it is really, really hard. it took a mo money game just to see it happen ONCE, forget the idea of having it happen multiple times in normal games. it's also very vulnerable in many situations, high magic resistance would have it burning it's One Weird Trick and wasting all of that mammoth investment. a couple of bane lords with magic resist gear would be able to plow through many vanguard armies and would disassemble that golem. Just to be clear. Any mage with astral can cast this spell in combat, if you have a large enough communion behind them. Nations with lots of cheap astral mages, or any nation that gets a magic site that lets them recruit (say) Sages early in the game, can get to Mass Enslave. The real issue is that the spell itself is very high level, so you're not casting it early or midgame anyway, and it's not strong against magic resist so it's easy for enemy commanders to counter, and the caster of the spell is often pretty vulnerable (sages are old men in robes, for example). But you don't have to get a guy to S9 or whatever just to use the spell, because communions. e. Oops I didn't notice another page of posts, but I'll leave this here anyway. In a recent game I was able to mass 32+ s1 and s2 casters into an army to run a communion and boost an S3 guy with a hat and a coin high enough to cast mass enslave. But they died without ever getting the spell off because my opponent cast rain of stones on turn one and murdered them. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 02:33 on Apr 24, 2017 |
|
#
?
Apr 24, 2017 02:30
|
|
|
It was turn two! My dudes needed a round to cast Earthpower. You could have spent that buff round having everyone cast Body Ethereal or something and they would have been fine!
|
|
#
?
Apr 24, 2017 02:41
|
|
|
I didn't know I'd get two turns, didn't know body ethereal worked (I assumed RoS were magic attacks), and would have had to re-script every single mage in like turn 75 of a game I'd lost on turn one. Anyway that's all beside the point I'm making here, which is: you can cast Mass Enslave with a big communion even without piling on lots of expensive items, but there are still ways to counter it, it's not a panacea. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Apr 24, 2017 |
|
#
?
Apr 24, 2017 02:44
|
|
|
Turn 86 Turn 86 begins with a message from our good friend Pangaea:  What does this even mean, bro? Huh, OK. Sure enough: Pan sent us 3 Water Bracelet magic booster items. I really don’t quite understand what he’s doing, so whatever. We hit research level 6 in Evocation this turn. I’m kind of out of immediate research targets, we have access to just about everything we want right now, so I’m putting our points into Evocation just to research up to level 7 and get Fire Storm (a battlefield pulse spell that will quickly turn armies lacking Fire Resistance into ash). It isn’t a key spell or a lynchpin to a plan, but it’d be nice to have. We claim the Throne of Eternal Suffering. Our Dominion should now be neutral Luck/Misfortune, and we get +1 Order and +1 Productivity to help lessen our terrible default Turmoil 3 Sloth 3 scales. We also get more Dom-spread, which is excellent.  An unpopular Throne, but we want the domspread. We get this message, a report from Fas Dir:  Looks like somebody (Bogarus) has tried to throw another spell at Fas Dir. It’s pretty clearly Bogarus because he’s been the one hurling other spells at Fas Dir. The report doesn’t specify what spell was cast, but it does inform us that the offending mage was blasted with fire by the Dome of Flaming Death. Cool! Last turn we had a newly boosted Kohen Gadol and our Prince of Lust throw a Horror at one of Bogarus’ very lightly defended provinces. I’m a little down on the whole “Horror Cannon” idea at this point, but, you know, something to do. Two Horrors descend on the battlefield... and immediately attack each other:   Yeap, Horrors will do that. In order to ensure that they don’t start fighting amongst themselves it is important that there are enemies present with Horror Marks, which are irresistible to Horrors and draw their attention. The battle phase of this turn was pretty great. First, we sent 6 Vampire Lords and a handful of lesser Vampires to attack The Cracked Earth last turn. Recall that Caelum, after a disastrously botched attempt to storm Bogarus’ fort, ceded the province to us, provided we can take it. We had strong candles present, so the Vampires were dispatched. Caelum’s token Scout, left merely to “maintain siege”, flees instantly.  A very wise Scout. However, there were two battles in The Cracked Earth this turn. Bogarus sent something to attack Caelum’s sieging force as well, and his army arrived just hours after our own:   poo poo! It’s the Bane Lord Thug squad! I wouldn’t be worried about a couple of Bane Lord thugs, but there are 14 of them… Our Vampires, on defense thank god, throw up a quick wall of skeletons to shield themselves.  Let the  begin.The Bane Lords fly straight across the battlefield and engage in melee, cleaving longdead warriors in two with mighty blows.  The longdead, being undead, don’t care about casualties or danger and advance on the Bane Lords, getting tangled up in vines from the Vine Shields the thugs are carrying. That’s fine by me, however, because as long as the longdead are standing between the thugs and our Vampires I’m happy.  Our skeletons become a lovely wall of bones. The Vampires go off script after 5 rounds and start casting on their own. One of the first spells the AI chooses is… Control the Dead!  Control the Dead is a niche spell that I can’t ever remember seeing used intentionally, but in this scenario it works brilliantly. Here’s a Bane Lord standing threateningly next to one of our Vampires:  And after being successfully hit by Control the Dead:   There are two categories of Charm/Dominate/Enslave/Seduce spells in Dominions 4: those that take a unit as-is (i.e. an enslaved commander or mage remains a commander or mage), and those that instantly turn any commander unit affected into a troop unit. So, since the Bane Lord turned from a commander into a troop you can tell that the spell worked, he’s ours. This continues:  And the battle ends shortly afterward:  The total gem investment lost in those 11 dead or dominated Bane Lords equals: 122 Death gems, 111 Air gems, 55 Water gems, and 111 Nature gems. That is actually a pretty huge investment for how hilariously wrong it all went for Bogarus. Now, two things: Firstly that battle would have gone very differently if we hadn’t been on defense and had the first round. The thugs would have cleared the field and possibly one-shot 60% of our Vampire Lords immediately. Secondly, Ramc didn’t come up with this strategy. I remember scouting the Bane Lord thug squad while Morrow was still playing Bogarus, just saying.  Our Vampire Lords do get some sweet new bodyguards, though. We see Pangaea attempt to storm those two Ragha forts for, what, the 3rd or 4th time?   Pure chaos. Beast men trampling human-bred Raghans led by a Golden Cow and backed up by weird angelic Fravashi things. Just a mess.  Horrifying casualties, Christ almighty. Pan does eliminate like 90% of the remaining defenders in each fort, and will almost certainly take them both next turn, but jeez. A little effort would have gone a long way in these fights. We also pinged the defenders of the fort we cracked in Ferra:  Nobody's home. Wow, another completely emptied-out fortress. I am beginning to suspect that Ramc is evacuating the mages that I’m almost certain were inside at the time we put them to siege! The Astrapelagists are A2, so they could Cloud Trapeeze out of the forts, though that would be spending a lot of Air gems. Whatever, I’ll take it. Since there is no commander in the fort Bogarus’ troops auto-rout, so we’re sending a Scout back in with orders to Hold x5, which should both give the defending remnant the chance to flee the field -and- be a very sad prize if Ramc decides to send his Enslaving Golem to set a trap for us. One of the events that happened this turn reveals the mystery of what happened in Fas Dir:  Good ol’ Rain of Toads! Unfortunately for Bogarus there’s no point at all to casting it, we have the Gift of Health so any disease caught by our troops will be healed in a turn or two. Alright, before we end let’s talk diplomacy and plans. Pangaea, Afrosquirrel, finally caught up with me on IRC and we had a chat about our increasingly heating cold war in the East. Afro claims that he’s merely building up forces there to defend against us, because he’s very convinced that our spreading Dominion means imminent Vampire invasion. I’ll be honest: if I were in his shoes I’d be feeling the same way. I don’t plan to do anything like that until Bogarus has been crippled…but Afrosquirrel’s paranoia isn’t unfounded. I tell him, truthfully, that I’d much rather be committing my strength to hitting Bogarus, and I offer to move some of my troops away if he will first move his doom-stack armies at least one province away from the immediate border.  Could there truly be a draw-down in the East? I also gleaned a couple of other bits of information in the brief conversation. He mentioned that he has Dryads hidden and Preaching on our side of the border, which is Bad and must be dealt with. He also mentioned that he tried to throw up a 200 gem Eternal Pyre last turn, which must have bounced against one of our much, much stronger globals and fizzled. More Pearls for us, the Nexus feeds (139 Pearls this turn)! So, we’re going to take him at his word in this instance, and I am eager to see if he does decide to pull troops away from our Eastern border next turn. If he does, I’ll do some of the same and we’ll refocus on Bogarus. I’d planned to have our four Horror Cannons all fire into a single border province full of Hoburgs and Dryads, but instead they’ll just cast Horror Seeds at Pangaea’s capitol.   Yeah we're just going to Seed everything in range. Speaking of Bogarus, we’ll be “storming” the fort in Ferra next turn, and then also pinging the newly cracked fort in Banded Hills. We’ll soon reinforce the Vampires in The Cracked Earth, because we want that province so we can summon Se’irim somewhere other than the far Eastern corner of our Empire!  War in the West is going swimmingly!
|
|
#
?
Apr 24, 2017 03:13
|
|
|
Who wants to put odds that vamps with bane lord bodyguards get left behind during another vampire air drop?
|
|
#
?
Apr 24, 2017 04:11
|
|
|
Donkringel posted:Who wants to put odds that vamps with bane lord bodyguards get left behind during another vampire air drop? Looks like they kept the effect of the flying gear, so they're probably fine.
|
|
#
?
Apr 24, 2017 05:03
|
|
|
Pretty hilarious that the vampires going off-script choose the right spell to cast. How clever is the AI about those picks, in any case? Is it mostly up to random chance whether they're useless or useful? Or does the AI possess some awareness of what it's clever to utilize?
|
|
#
?
Apr 24, 2017 05:09
|
|
|
I personally know that mages with high death magic will often make good situational use of the array of damaging, debilitating, and summoning spells available to them off-script, as long as you have the right research for them to have those spells, and I know that mages like to buff big crowds of nearby friendlies, even when the buffs are incredibly useless or highly situational. Mages seem to prefer spamming damage spells at enemies in range (up to and including touch spells, if given the opportunity), but then again, mages off-script seem to sometimes do bewildering things too, like buffing themselves for melee combat (though I wouldn't be surprised if that last one got patched out or at least made less common somewhere along the way). If there's a simple rule of thumb, I'd love to hear it.
|
|
#
?
Apr 24, 2017 05:24
|
|
|
Death seems to be a particularly good type of magic for off-script battlefield magic. Like Shady Amish Terror said: mages love to default to casting buffs of dubious usefulness once they've gone off script. There are very few Death buffs, and there are actually a lot of much more useful Death Evocations and summons. Mages with D2+ often default to casting Horde of Skeletons, which is always welcome in virtually every circumstance. I'd much rather have a dozen Death mages casting off-script than mages wielding any other type of magic. And, regarding the game AI and choosing spells to cast; well it's pretty much as dumb as a bag of bricks. Thus: my surprise and delight at how that battle went.
|
|
#
?
Apr 24, 2017 05:37
|
|
|
 N and W mages normally just end up casting a bunch of useless self buffs. F at least will vomit out evocations non-stop. And E is a coin toss between off-center buffs and decent spells.
|
|
#
?
Apr 24, 2017 07:05
|
|
|
Bug Squash posted:A 75% chance to reform on death at a random spot on the battlefield (for example directly beside the enemy mages). It also auto-generates flying bugs every turn that play havoc with enemy mage scripts. Plus enough nature magic to cast creeping doom, howl, storm of thorns and charm. that's loving ridiculous and your name is very appropriate to this discussion
|
|
#
?
Apr 24, 2017 14:14
|
|
|
S mages are maybe the absolute worst off-script dudes, especially in assassinations. 'do i enslave or slay soul this dude? naw dogg better cast luck'
|
|
|
#
?
Apr 24, 2017 18:53
|
|
|
Some paths are good with certain research but bad when you hit others. Like, Air is excellent but then you hit Confusion and whoops. Same for Fire and Phoenix Pyre. Astral is always bad, though. Nature is almost entirely research dependent. Earth can vary a lot depending on if the enemy is bad against projectiles. Death is usually good. Water can also vary a lot, low-W mages usually just buff but high-W can go nuts with off-script Freezing Mists or long-range Frozen Heart.
|
|
#
?
Apr 25, 2017 04:55
|
|
|
S mages really are the worst for bad decisions. I can't count how many times one has randomly blinked right into the enemy lines before being promptly murdered.
|
|
#
?
Apr 25, 2017 06:14
|
|
|
Is it just impossible to get at the AI scripting? I figured given the crazy modding that goes into this game that someone somewhere would have cracked it open.
|
|
#
?
Apr 25, 2017 08:24
|
|
|
The single best mod that could ever be made for dominions would be one that removes the useless trash spells and units from the game.
|
|
#
?
Apr 25, 2017 20:00
|
|
|
Corbeau posted:The single best mod that could ever be made for dominions would be one that removes the useless trash spells and units from the game. Then whatever is left just becomes the useless trash. There will always be something that is bottom tier crap.
|
|
#
?
Apr 25, 2017 20:09
|
|
|
Corbeau posted:The single best mod that could ever be made for dominions would be one that removes the useless trash spells and units from the game. This is the "better independents" mod from Dominions 3.
|
|
#
?
Apr 25, 2017 20:23
|
|
|
Zaodai posted:Then whatever is left just becomes the useless trash. There will always be something that is bottom tier crap.
|
|
#
?
Apr 25, 2017 20:25
|
|
|
Bug Squash posted:I don't think you've thought this through, because this makes no sense. If you get rid of all the worthless stuff, something else ends up being worthless on the new scale. Unless you leave 1 unit and 1 spell, there's going to be something optimal and something not.
|
|
#
?
Apr 25, 2017 20:28
|
|
|
whowhatwhere posted:Is it just impossible to get at the AI scripting? I figured given the crazy modding that goes into this game that someone somewhere would have cracked it open. As far as I'm aware the AI logic is directly hardcoded in the binaries. That would require decompiling the code then figuring it out. This a difficult because the code base is a disaster from what I heard and decompiling makes it much much worse. It remove's all of the names and doesn't keep the original structure completely intact. Then, after editing the code you have to actually dis tribute new .exe files to everyone to use it.
|
|
#
?
Apr 25, 2017 20:33
|
|
|
Zaodai posted:If you get rid of all the worthless stuff, something else ends up being worthless on the new scale. Unless you leave 1 unit and 1 spell, there's going to be something optimal and something not. There's a difference between suboptimal, situational and useless. There's plenty of outright useless spells that any experienced players will never cast.
|
|
#
?
Apr 25, 2017 20:38
|
|
|
Zaodai posted:If you get rid of all the worthless stuff, something else ends up being worthless on the new scale. Unless you leave 1 unit and 1 spell, there's going to be something optimal and something not. ...that's not how rock, paper, scissors works. Like, I understand what you're saying, some things will tend in most systems to be better choices than others in most situations, but you're phrasing it in the most ridiculously extreme hyperbole possible. At the very least, it's a bit extreme to say that something will always by necessity be 'worthless'. It's possible (and encouraged) to have a game system where there are no strategies without a niche, but Dominions adds a lot of stuff that's just there for charming flavor. This increases the breadth of Dominions' problem-space without increasing its depth, which understandably irks some people, particularly since it violates an old strategy-game rule of thumb that you should remove or automate all no-brainer decisions. Dominions is large enough that it would be difficult to perfectly balance, perhaps impossible, but it's weird to have this knee-jerk reaction because it makes it sound like you're arguing that there's no reason to consider streamlining the game. The argument writ large makes it sound like no game can ever be streamlined or improved. You can argue that Dominions doesn't need that kind of trimming because it has its own niche as the game with a million forgettable options that someday might prove clutch exactly once ever, but it's weird to just say 'the more options you remove the more you make objectively worthless', which seems to be the thrust of your statement. I mean, if you reduced everything to a coinflip between two equal options, 'heads' will not be inherently better than 'tails'.
|
|
#
?
Apr 25, 2017 20:41
|
|
|
Zaodai posted:If you get rid of all the worthless stuff, something else ends up being worthless on the new scale. Unless you leave 1 unit and 1 spell, there's going to be something optimal and something not. Like, astral geyser would go from mediocre to bottom tier under this system, but you would still cast it if you were facing an army of vampires. Consider the flip side of what you're saying. By your logic if we injected a hundred new hypershit spells into the game, then we'd suddenly start casting the currently normalshit spells.
|
|
#
?
Apr 25, 2017 20:41
|
|
|
Tagichatn posted:There's a difference between suboptimal, situational and useless. There's plenty of outright useless spells that any experienced players will never cast. While this is relatively true, the AI does tend to default to at least situationally useful spells - just not for the situation they're casting them in. I can think of plenty of instances where I might want a mage casting Personal Luck - just not during an assassination attempt.
|
|
#
?
Apr 25, 2017 20:42
|
|
|
Some of the useful spells are useful because they counter the useless poo poo, thus making them useless. If you get rid of what is being countered, then the counter itself goes down in value. Some stuff is objectively good on its own, but not everything is. To think you can just be like "cut the stuff nobody uses, there now everything is just as usable as before" is equally stupid.
|
|
#
?
Apr 25, 2017 20:50
|
|
|
Normally dumb spell Stream of Life killed a Mockery.
|
|
|
#
?
Apr 25, 2017 20:51
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 11, 2024 12:42 |
|
|
Zaodai posted:Some of the useful spells are useful because they counter the useless poo poo, thus making them useless. If you get rid of what is being countered, then the counter itself goes down in value. ...if a spell is only 'useful' because it counters something no one uses, then both are useless, because the use case for that spell never comes up. If a spell counters something that has a rare niche, then congrats, you have a small amount of tactical interplay and neither is completely useless, just niche or suboptimal, and the situation in which they're the right choice rarely comes up, but they're still not useless. Truly worthless stuff in Dominions would be like the large number of different independent army units that are just anomalously a couple points worse than others of the same cost, or the various low-level spells that don't even have a use on turn 1, much less turn 20. You either want a very different game than Dominions (this is fine), or I think perhaps we're all talking past each other and you're not really understanding what some of us are saying with regards to Dominions' problem-space.
|
|
#
?
Apr 25, 2017 21:00
|
|