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Corbeau posted:Map gen now has a little toggle for generic starts, so making maps for mapgen or other modded games is possible. Eventually I want to be able to load a list of nations from a file (mod file, ideally) complete with start preferences, but that's not likely in version 1.0. Oh, and the generic nation setting is separate from era choice so you can pick whether you want more magic sites and forests (early era), or more farmlands (late era), or in between (middle era). It doesn't govern which era the mod chooses, which is how the game chooses population and indes, but you can still shift base terrain type odds in mapgen. People already complain about the low gold income in the early age so biasing provinces towards low-gold ones on top of what the game already does might not be the best
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Apr 19, 2017 03:51
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The Saddest Robot posted:More like the first 10-30 games. try to win your first game, imo.
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Apr 19, 2017 04:08
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Ramc posted:try to win your first game, imo. On that note, it's time for me to stop being lazy and do my writeup for MA Newbies, which after 88 goddamned turns of blood micro is finally loving over! This was my first ever multiplayer game of Dominions, with my previous experience being one stomp against the AI and testing expansion with a couple recommended nations. I did have some experience with playing Age of Wonders III multiplayer and was comfortable with the idea of playing proactively in a multiplayer 4x in general, but I was a complete newcomer to any of Dominions-specific mechanics and prior to the game starting I had never even used a mage in combat. My pick for Vanarus was somewhat arbitrary; I had been told Vanheim was good, but I didn't want to be the guy picking overpowered nations just for the sake of it. Glamour infantry seemed more affordable than Vans and could still expand well, and that was good enough for me! I didn't even realize they were one of the few blood sac nations in MA until much, much later in the game when I was fiddling with the UI to micro one of my Vanabogs  Coming from a more conventional 4x experience, I knew I wanted to establish a strong economic foundation in the early game. Thus, in addition to picking a nation whose troops could expand well, I also took an Ormr as my god (Erfy does not do well with cold nations). I didn't have any real plan other than to get rich quick, and I figured that a pace of 1-2 turns a day would give me enough time to learn the rest of the mechanics as they came up. I still made some rookie mistakes on the outset like taking Production 3 over any Order (my dudes wear a lot of armor, but not that much), expanding with MM1 unblessed Oath-Bound instead of just making Chuds, and dawdling a whole lot when it came to setting up a blood economy, but this was a newbie game so everyone was making those kind of mistakes.  My expansion plans worked out well and I was among the largest nations from the very beginning of the game.  Forts are expensive, and Vanarus has a lot of things to spend gold on without needing them to make good mages. I built two early on and conquered the rest.  Vanarus has an insatiable hunger for gold and none of its workhorse mages are sacred, meaning it will eventually develop enormous upkeep. Even as the richest nation in the game, at the best of times I had barely enough money to feed the mage machine and I never had anything in the bank. I built loving Draupnir.  I was a big nation with lots and lots of crosspaths, so I naturally had lots of gems to go with it. The big spikes are Well of Misery going up, Well of Misery going down, and me flipping 1/4th of Arco's gem income on turn 1 of the invasion. By endgame I also had enough slaves coming in to have three dudes casting Infernal Tempest while also dumping like a Vamp Lord worth of slaves into sacrifice, though I was lazy and started expanding my hunting operations much later than I could have.  Vanarus has pretty strong research and I dropped my second lab on turn four. Throw thirty-ish Lanterns around midgame and there wasn't really anything the other nations could do to keep up. I leveraged this pretty well early on, but by allowing lategame to go so late I largely squandered my advantage. Sure, nobody else hit literally maximum research, but by the end everyone had whatever they really wanted.  only_nation_with_bloodsac.jpg Vanarus has access to a summonable H3 and I made like two dozen of them, on top of an Enchanted Forests at end game. Domkill was my original plan A but I ended up winning on thrones instead.  As usual, troop counts don't say a whole lot other than how good Rain of Stones is at blowing up Manikin and how good the AI is at dumpstering armies. This post is getting pretty long (much like the game), so I'll run down a quick timeline: *Expansion goes well. Asphodel is a terrifying early neighbor, but the player isn't bless rushing and offers an early NAP. I thank my lucky stars and gladly accept. *Across the map, Sceleria is also expanding well, but antagonizing many neighbors while doing so. I do some backroom legwork and organize a dogpile to give my neighbors an outlet for their aggression other than myself, and I try to get as many nations involved as possible to make sure no one power comes out too large in the end. *Agartha mistakes one of my expansions for my capital, estimates that I'm much smaller than I am, and invades me despite being half my size. I manage to welp an army to my own hubris anyways, but Agartha immediately does the same and I regain the upper footing. Meanwhile I've let R'lyeh know that Agartha's is vulnerable and they invade in force. Agartha sues for peace and pays reparations, and I accept their terms so they can serve as a check on R'lyeh's uncontested access to the sea. Getting invaded by a giant ball of Illithids immediately after losing their grand army to me is too much, and Agartha goes AI after putting up a respectable resistance. Asphodel moves in to take their territory and continue contesting R'lyeh on the land, which I am happy enough to allow. *I've run out of expansion room and am starting to choke on my own upkeep, but now that I've made peace with Agartha and secured my other borders with NAPs the only option for expansion is Man, who is awkwardly positioned for an invasion. I work some deals with my neighbor Xibalba to make things more feasible (and make sure they're okay with me invading a nominal ally of theirs) and send in the troops. It turns out Man had Crystal Amazons in their cap circle, so they have a giant T-strike communion that inflicts a lot of damage. However, I'm still much larger and richer than them, and they don't have the money to replace their losses or the forces to split up and deal with my Vyedun raiding and setting up PD traps. The original deal with Xibalba was that we would team up and split the holdings after the war, but Man folds sooner than expected and Zoiks is to busy cooking marshmallows outside of Sceleria's cap so I keep the whole thing. Somewhere during this time Arco and Ulm turn on Ashdod, but this doesn't really affect me. *I come out of the first round of expansion wars in a somewhat precarious position. I'm the largest and most powerful nation, but obviously so, and I have borders with the next three largest powers. I need to make sure I'm not the next target, so I start diplomancing aggressively at trying to organize a coalition against Asphodel, one of the other major powers. They're very large and haven't really been challenged during the game, so theoretically they should be formidable. I'm also leveraging my position to implicitly strongarm people into going along with my plans. I never make any direct threats, but it's definitely less scary to be with me than against me. The plan works, and Asphodel turns out to be something of a paper tiger. They've choked a bit on their own popkill and don't have any battle magic to speak of, so their armies are crushed in a handful of decisive battles. At this point I've also started ramping up my blood sac to counter Asphodel's cancerous dominion and R'lyeh casting a Vengeful Waters. *As the Asphodel war is being wrapped up, I start working on the next stage of diplomacy, with the objective again not to become the next target of the UN Council of Dogpiling the Biggest Nation that I've so helpfully organized. I'm probably already strong enough to survive a war against the entire world, but I don't want to find out the hard way. At this point the powers are me and Xibalba, with Arco and Ulm being minor nations and R'lyeh apparently having gone AFK. The little guys seem to understand that dogpiling me with Xibalba at this point is just directly kingmaking for them, but I'm still an obvious threat to the world. Nobody seems entirely sure what's going to happen next. *During something of an Interbellum (Asphodel is technically alive), Arco throws up Arcane Nexus. Some of you may already have heard about this, but advice from the old guard in IRC sends me into panic mode. I start mobilizing an invasion force as soon as it goes up while failing a fairly large dispel and empowering an AC caster to be used if necessary. The other nations aren't really willing to help me anymore at this point, but Nexus is scary enough that they won't stop me from killing Arco, which is honestly good enough. Arco isn't anything close to a match for me in a straight fight and opening the war with an overwhelming surprise attack puts them in an even worse position, but they still have endgame research and some big loving stacks of communion mages that I don't want to fight head on. The war slows down quite a lot after my initial attack as I settle into sieges and try to find a solution to their mages that doesn't involve letting them cast hosed up spells at me. The answer turn out to be Flames from the Sky, forcing their mage stacks to move aggressively into Rain of Stones traps without ever having to deal with them in a fair fight. The other reason I'm throwing this spell around is hunting for their Nexus holder, who is just a lucky cap mage and doesn't take well to being bathed in fire. Losing Nexus and their mage stacks after their field armies died in the beginning of the war essentially neuters Arco as a power, though I still don't have enough thrones to end the game. *With Nexus down and Arco essentially dead in the water, it's time to aggressively move towards finishing the game (note: this time was actually ¬20 turns ago)..except I need to take Xibalba's thrones to do it, and we still have loving forever left on our NAPs. I slam down Enchanted Forests to go with my blood sac and wait for Xibalba to declare war, but Zoiks is too burned out on the game to script an invasion force, so instead he casts Looming Hell as a global wardec. This doesn't really matter to me since my dominion is flooding everywhere at this point, so I declare that I will no longer permit his Blood Vortex to steal my population and demand an arbitrary number of slaves as reparation and invade after he refuses. It turns out he's too burned out on the game to script defensive armies either, and so he entrusts his nation to the capable hands of the AI, which manages to dumpster hundreds of vampires, demons, and demon lords for negligible gain while also losing all its thrones and getting its god killed twice in three turns. My prophet, Ambassador Karlov, having long outlived both his namesake and his relevance as a meme, claims the last throne required for victory in a game that was desperate to end. Probably the biggest takeaways from this as a newbie are that strong starts are important, and older players aren't joking when they say that Diplomancy is the strongest school of magic. EDIT: if you finished this post you know roughly what it felt like to finish this game. EDIT EDIT: writing this still took less time than scripting one of my endgame invasion turns 
Voyager I fucked around with this message at 07:23 on Apr 19, 2017 |
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Apr 19, 2017 07:20
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The Saddest Robot posted:More like the first 10-30 games. Nah, by 10+ games you should know (mostly) everything that can get thrown around, sure there will be odd curve balls, but you'll have seen most things. Now you're at the point where you generally know what strategies will be employed, but you're still bad and get run over by more experienced players.
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Apr 19, 2017 19:39
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Voyager I posted:*During something of an Interbellum (Asphodel is technically alive), Arco throws up Arcane Nexus. Some of you may already have heard about this, but advice from the old guard in IRC sends me into panic mode. I start mobilizing an invasion force as soon as it goes up while failing a fairly large dispel and empowering an AC caster to be used if necessary. The other nations aren't really willing to help me anymore at this point, but Nexus is scary enough that they won't stop me from killing Arco, which is honestly good enough. Arco isn't anything close to a match for me in a straight fight and opening the war with an overwhelming surprise attack puts them in an even worse position, but they still have endgame research and some big loving stacks of communion mages that I don't want to fight head on. The war slows down quite a lot after my initial attack as I settle into sieges and try to find a solution to their mages that doesn't involve letting them cast hosed up spells at me. The answer turn out to be Flames from the Sky, forcing their mage stacks to move aggressively into Rain of Stones traps without ever having to deal with them in a fair fight. The other reason I'm throwing this spell around is hunting for their Nexus holder, who is just a lucky cap mage and doesn't take well to being bathed in fire. Losing Nexus and their mage stacks after their field armies died in the beginning of the war essentially neuters Arco as a power, though I still don't have enough thrones to end the game. I just want to add that, unbeknownst to Voyager, his initial invasion instantly put me into negative cash income. I had hardly any troops to use with my mages to create effective forces, and I didn't get back to positive income until I'd junked two or three armies and lost my most important dudes. I also had spent a huge pile of gems on Nexus: I think it was 260? I never made those gems back. I was able to cast Wish for gems twice before Voyager got very lucky with a flames cast that took out my Nexus caster, who was also my Wish caster. I had had to empower him the last level needed to get to wish, which was another 90 pearls, basically all the pearl income I'd gotten from Nexus after I'd put it up. So, getting to Wish was 350+ pearls, 100 of which were alchemized from other gems (mostly water). Another 200 pearls on those two wishes, most of which came from Nexus processing me dumping the entire rest of my gem stockpile into summons. With no ability to recruit troops at all, I just went into summon mode, trying to get enough random summonables to protect mages in battle. Voyager never took the fortress my pretender was holed up in, so he never found out that there was a 20% discount Conjuration site there, but he had effectively isolated it. It had a1 recruitable spring mages there, plus my pretender, a random golem I got in an event, and I teleported a couple of s mages in, but I just couldn't really take advantage of the Conjuration site and couldn't put together reasonable armies of conjured troops for my actual large stacks of mages. At the end of the game I still had easily 150+ mages in my cap and the two major forts I had, but every sortie I'd made just wound up losing all the mages in the stack to rain of stones, so welp. So basically his surprise attack was far more devastating than he even guessed. My troops, such as they were, were spread out due to funneling all my efforts against aspho through a single, no-roads forest province, plus my generally horrendously high upkeep for my vast legions of non-sacred mages. Going instantly into negative gold was far worse than seeing a third of my gem income vanish. I estimate that if he had not surprise attacked me and I had not been clued in to the potential of a wish engine (I hadn't even researched the level needed to cast wish), I would have broken even on astral pearls after maybe another two years of game. E.g., never. Van and Xib were both mostly doing blood, my own pearl useage doesn't generate pearls, ulm and rlyeh were basically not doing anything, and I did not understand what to do with Nexus. I had vague ideas of eventually getting to Wish, but I was going to use it to wish or tarts or something, but no really solid ideas. Anyway well played to Voyager I. He successfully convinced everyone not to attack him until the only one who could unilaterally attack him, xibalba, wasn't willing to do it. Everyone with real forces on the table had ridiculous NAPs with him that were going to last for many turns after Aspho was gone. He won the game when he established those NAPs before we even attacked Aspho, it just took another two years of in-game time to play out. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 20:14 on Apr 19, 2017 |
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Apr 19, 2017 20:11
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My problem as MA Xib was sheer incompetence. I kept trying to beat sceleria with smelly spamming bats and never used enough. I only eventually won because Ashdod did all the work then got dogpiled before he could follow up and take any provinces. Once I failed to actually attack Man in time I knew I was pretty much boned since I just fought a hell war with only popkill prove to show for it and everyone was so afraid of bat raiders they had ridiculous PD. I had a blood site so figured I should just hunker down for a bit and get my blood going then win with vamp spam, but I failed to consider what my lack of blood sac would do to that plan. I also had no idea that I should have been mass casting ritual of he five gates until way too late. I still don't know what I should have done midgame with terrible troops and mages, so if anyone wants to tell me the obvious please do.
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Apr 19, 2017 20:41
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Senor Dog posted:My problem as MA Xib was sheer incompetence. I kept trying to beat sceleria with smelly spamming bats and never used enough. I only eventually won because Ashdod did all the work then got dogpiled before he could follow up and take any provinces. To be totally honest you probably should have brutally crushed me by midgame instead of signing a NAP with me. It was definitely a mistake to agree to a NAP with me and vanarus to go after aspho instead of either attacking me and eating my nation unilatierally, or joining with me against van. Your guys did poorly against sceleria but that was a special case (where you needed to use battle magic effective against blessed undead or at least equip your thugs with magic weapons); if you'd swarmed me with bats and frog men I was probably gonna die. e. I'm no expert but I also think you can use blood mages in battle pretty effectively, there are some really good blood spells?
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Apr 19, 2017 22:00
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Someone is doing a LP with my WW2 mod  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gc9RSgYGhPE
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Apr 20, 2017 03:42
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Samog posted:People already complain about the low gold income in the early age so biasing provinces towards low-gold ones on top of what the game already does might not be the best I've taken some time to think this over; it might be an issue, but I doubt it will be a significant one. For one, I'm beginning to suspect that my map gen spits out more "large" provinces. It also generates more plains in general (so EA ought to be similar to base dom4 in terms of province type). In other words, my map gen already has a bit more gold than default. The big difference is that it places that gold between players, as conflict points, rather than handing it out for free next to start locations. So I don't think lack of gold is an issue. If anything, I suspect that I might need to rein in LA's gold generation. What I'd like to do with EA, however, is increase the magic. That's what EA is all about, right? Well, what I want to do with EA is to have there be very few farmland provinces (the usual bait that gets placed between players to start conflicts) and instead many obvious magic site provinces. Ones where the type of site is obvious just from looking at the map, so you can actually find the damned things reliably. All ages would get some of these, but EA would be most biased towards magic sites rather than farms for conflict points. Even if EA ends up a little short on gold compared to LA, it ought to have significantly more gems - so people can do stuff, it just won't be the same stuff that an LA game will throw at you. All of this is fairly subtle though, and if it needs tweaks I am more inclined to further tone it down rather than amplify the differences. Corbeau fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Apr 21, 2017 |
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Apr 21, 2017 23:33
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Also, beginning to experiment with sprite placement in mountainous provinces:  No work yet done on ground texture. e: Another pic after more code tweaks - Agartha looking legit: 
Corbeau fucked around with this message at 00:13 on Apr 22, 2017 |
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Apr 21, 2017 23:53
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Wow, I'm an AI only scrub and I'm totally going to be using this for all my stupid games.
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Apr 22, 2017 00:23
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I know I for one can't wait to start using this to generate maps for my test games.
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Apr 22, 2017 00:29
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Early Age Newbehs has ended: Arcoscephale reigns supreme! Behold the new Pantokrator:  Behold his world:  After surveying my nation and trying my hand at expansion in one or two single-player games, I quickly came to the conclusion that, while Arco's mages are great, its troop line-up is severely lacking. Therefore I went for a Sloth build to a) make my mages relevant sooner, as Philosophers work better in Sloth dominion and b) avoid spending any design points on Arco's terrible high-resource units. Picking the big dumb snake sorted out expansion and afforded me great scales. A Dom7Earth6 snake might have been a slightly better build, but this served me well enough. I should probably have taken at least Sloth 2 though, because the units aren't THAT bad and I could've used some more of them to die so my mages wouldn't have to, and it's not like I was lacking for research this game. Going into this, my plan was to put strong Mystic communions together as quickly as possible. To this end, my capital produced only Philosophers during the early game to get the necessary research while I built several forts to crank out Mystics. I was fairly vulnerable during this period with nothing but a big dumb snake and a couple of javelin-throwers for defence, but it worked out and when I first went to war I was about to complete my eighth fort in my 15-province area which is not excessive at all shut up I'm brilliant. I'd secured friendly relations with most of my neighbours while I was preparing my invasion forces. My target was always going to be Fomoria based on location alone: the map only wrapped around in one direction and I was fairly centrally placed, with I think about 5 or 6 neighbours. Fomoria meanwhile was stuck against the border on one side and a sea on another, leaving them with only myself and Lanka as neighbours. I was happy to add some easily-defensible territory to my lands, and also aware of the fact that I was one of only two possible invasion targets for Fomoria itself. I didn't want them stabbing me in the back while my armies were off conquering someone else, so I resolved to stab them first. The war went fairly smoothly: my mages overwhelmed Fomoria's defences while my snake went off to take their ocean provinces. I lost more mages than I should have, mainly because I had way too few arrow catchers (well, lightning catchers) in front, but the losses I took were still very much acceptable. As an aside, it turns out that taking Sloth 3 and building a big network of adjacent forts has somewhat of an adverse effect on one's ability to produce troops. It also has the annoying side-effect of leaving the fortless provinces inbetween at 0 resources, and I had a chronic shortage of (independent) commanders as a result. Recruiting large enough armies and getting them to the right place under effective commanders was a constant frustration during this game, eased somewhat by the Riches From Beneath I ended up casting later in the game. While the war was progressing, my Philosophers and the mages I held in reserve were busy amassing a ridiculous amount of RP. Sometime during the war with Fomoria, I put up Mother Oak and got the necessary research for Mind Hunt (+ boosters and Soul Slay) and wondered what to research next. Around this point I was running into gold problems with 10 forts cranking out mages non-stop, and I wasn't building as many mundane troops or Oreiads as I would have liked. Therefore, rather than admit I'd built too many forts, I put all my research into Enchantment to get Gift of Nature's Bounty up as soon as possible and retroactively decided that that had been my master plan all along. Diplomacy was pretty simple during the early-to-midgame: it looked to me like everybody just about paired off, with one conquering the other. Then again, I didn't find an independent scout province until turn 51 and was pretty committed to the idea of never not building Mystics from my forts, so I only had the one scout and the conversations I had with other players as my intelligence sources. There were three major powers when I finished the conquest of Fomoria: Helheim, Pangaea and myself, with Ur as a minor power. I was pretty sure that I was hilariously far ahead in terms of research and forts, but Arco is probably generally the least powerful faction of the three and up to this point I was very much a one-trick pony, solving all of my problems by throwing evocations at them and floundering whenever that didn't work. Each of my neighbours expressed their willingness to ally with me against the other, but I had bigger plans. I played my trump card by putting up Gift of Nature's Bounty. I built a bunch more forts while nobody moved to stop me (even after Ur revealed the graphs to everyone, showing how far ahead I was) and then drowned the world in Mystics. Helheim folded pretty easily, but Pangaea put up a spirited defence (credits to Kiejzar). There was a big Pangaean stack that was rampaging through my territory which managed to keep moving in the best possible place to evade my traps and/or separate the forces I sent out to fight them. Still, as long as it was moving about it wasn't sieging down forts, so I wasn't particularly worried about it. In the end I decided to ignore it completely and go for the thrones instead. The army I was planning to use against the doomstack went for a pair of thrones in Pangaea's territory and I quickly assembled another to take the final throne I needed. It's a shame that these armies never really saw action against a proper enemy army, because I'm pretty sure that the second force especially would have effortlessly curbstomped anything Pangaea had and I would have liked to see the gems and scripting pay off. Meanwhile, the Pangaea doomstack finally did something as it sieged down and took my capital, but at this point I'd stopped caring about anything that wasn't a throne so whatever. On the globals front, my Mother Oak leading into Gift of Nature's Bounty was the obvious game-winning move. Ur's Eyes Of God was potentially game-changing on the diplomatic front, but nothing really came of that as far as I could tell. I put up Riches From Below to get some troop production going in my terrible forts and Dark Skies to make some use of my large collection of Air gems. Pangaea eventually stole my Mother Oak, but by then the damage had been done, and they were unlucky enough to then immediately overwrite it with their own Eternal Pyre. At some point Helheim cast Burden Of Time which uncharacteristically had no real impact at all (apart from overwriting my Dark Skies), as none of the three major nations really cared about its effects.  Look at plucky little (AI) Kailasa there, retaking some land after having been down to their sieged capital.  I built a lot of forts.  Gift of Nature's Bounty is great.  Not much to say here, Arco has varied paths for sitesearching and I did a lot of it.  Ahahahahahahahahahahahaahahahahahhahahahhahahhahaha  Lots of forts = lots of safe places to build temples.  Whatever.
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Apr 24, 2017 16:51
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I got completely wrecked by trying to repeat the dom3 boostheim strat. Turns out it's way less good when mentors are at const6. Also there were so many ridiculous unrest events that I never was able to afford a full helhirdling and hangadrott recruitment turn until way too late. I was a total paper tiger when you jumped me especially since AI kailasa had just killed a shitload of lings with swarm spam. Man I'm bad.
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Apr 24, 2017 18:10
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As the Ur player in that game, my takeaway is that not only is Ur bad, it's not even bad in an interesting way. Instead of having a cool gimmick that doesn't quite go the distance, you will spend the entire game finding new ways for your nation to troll you for playing it. Don't play Ur. Don't let your friends play Ur. If you see somebody playing Ur in your games, do the right thing and free them from the shackles of their terrible nation (and laugh as their Sirrushes retreat into a different province than their mages as you do it).
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Apr 25, 2017 05:20
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Voyager I posted:As the Ur player in that game, my takeaway is that not only is Ur bad, it's not even bad in an interesting way. Instead of having a cool gimmick that doesn't quite go the distance, you will spend the entire game finding new ways for your nation to troll you for playing it. Sounds like my life in bad nations worse magic. Enkidon't.
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Apr 25, 2017 06:05
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Voyager I posted:As the Ur player in that game, my takeaway is that not only is Ur bad, it's not even bad in an interesting way. Instead of having a cool gimmick that doesn't quite go the distance, you will spend the entire game finding new ways for your nation to troll you for playing it. transform your mages so they don't cost piles of gold then ... summon things, not the loving things that are stuck in their province from the water line, things like treeguys and anything else you can summon that isn't garbage with randoms you get, then do nature things to them and hopefully win fights. I was doing very well in a game with ur, though it was an all sites game and I found whatever gives you the 2 version of sages, put up GoH shortly after so those guys didn't get ancient, got some blood randoms and then the game exploded because the host ran away. I had a lot of astral gems.. something ridiculous like 400+ and was boosting my way in that and blood to do dirty poo poo like huge nexus cast, vampires and blood globals. Also, don't recruit sirrushes they are the joke of the nation. Ok, Ur is not a good nation and relies on some luck/diplomacy.
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Apr 25, 2017 06:39
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Here is a mod that makes Kailasa's recruitable sacreds not magic beings. It's good!
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Apr 27, 2017 00:29
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Combine it with the Make Patala Great Again mod IMO
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Apr 27, 2017 01:38
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More on mountains to come, but I went back and did some swamp tweaks (including some new sprites): e: Added more shadows:  e2: Color iteration and a better look at Mukip's plateau sprites for mountain provinces: 
Corbeau fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Apr 27, 2017 |
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Apr 27, 2017 22:56
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*Allied Recruitment V1 wholly superseded by V2 which is 3 posts down*
jBrereton fucked around with this message at 20:50 on Apr 29, 2017 |
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Apr 28, 2017 12:07
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Intriguing. Who wants to do a disciples game? I'd be down for one
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Apr 28, 2017 13:40
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Speleothing posted:Intriguing. Who wants to do a disciples game? I'd be down for one I have been in for one for a while, but there never seems to be more than 4-5 people interested.
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Apr 28, 2017 17:25
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Allied Recruitment V2 New Features: - Every nation, every era is supported - No extra sites in your own forts (unless I missed some way it could happen other than Charm/Enslave, in which case tell me and I'll get it fixed!) - No standing about for a turn for awkward transformation stuff. - Uses fewer monster IDs for easier compatibility with other mods (4200-8) - Allies of MA Ermor, Lemuria and Therodos UW get some Longdead/Spectral recruits that cost gold + res you can lead with normal commanders. jBrereton fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Apr 29, 2017 |
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Apr 29, 2017 20:49
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Is it possible to get a bad transformation result if you cast it underwater? Beyond almost certainly being turned into something aquatic.
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Apr 30, 2017 17:41
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shrimps don't have brains
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Apr 30, 2017 18:36
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violent sex idiot posted:shrimps don't have brains How long ago were you transformed
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Apr 30, 2017 18:57
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Decrepus posted:How long ago were you transformed 
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May 1, 2017 20:55
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So I'm playing Nier Automata, right? I get to a certain scene, and it overwhelms me with nostalgia for Dominions. (Spoilers, of course) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TCYgOy7Nfs Illwinter's got me by the loving throat. I'm already putting together communions in my head. So much for my free time this month. 
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May 1, 2017 22:59
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Summoned the gumption for a bit of mountain province work before dinner:   Still WIP. Corbeau fucked around with this message at 01:58 on May 2, 2017 |
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May 2, 2017 01:48
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Those mountains look fantastic. I love the idea of mountain provinces having little fertile valleys visible. Very Alpine.
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May 2, 2017 02:24
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No Snek has concluded with another Marignon winner, me! I actually picked Marignon because Mukip won with Marignon in a recent game and they looked pretty fun. I went with a dormant N9E4 thrice-horned boar with some order, production and misfortune. Maybe I should've taken it awake but mainly I wanted a major bless and good scales since the sacreds aren't cap only but require a huge amount of resources. Well, the knights do but flagellants are crap so I never really built many. I still expanded pretty well even without an awake since n9 bless knights kick the crap out of any indies you'd care to name. I met up with Eriu first in the northwest and we were friendly for most of the rest of the game. I also had Ashdod to my north, Mictlan to the east, Sceleria to my west and Pan to the south and made peace with all of them. Well, not with Sceleria since Eriu and I conspired to take him down before the skeletons got out of control. We blitzed him fairly well and I ended up with the capital. Sceleria ended up being the first to go AI and probably the one with the most reason. Ashdod staled several turns so I started moving on him. I ended up having to set him to AI but the AI barely put up a fight with Ashdod staling so many turns. At least he built some nice forts for me to take! By the time I got to the Ashdod capital though, Agartha had managed to work his way south and grabbed it a turn before I could. Turns out that a lot of people were worried about Agartha since he found a zotz province and ended being up attacked by three other nations. Agartha ceded Ashdod to me after I took a single province and I didn't pursue any further. Being carved up by multiple enemies means I'd barely get scraps and a capital is pretty good for not much effort. Props to Agartha though, they never went AI and held their own really well. By this point, my only neighbors were Eriu, Mictlan and Pan. I was on good terms with Eriu and Mictlan was uncommunicative but also had really garbage scales with death and such so I didn't really care to get his territory. Mictlan was a tribless iirc but had barely expanded so he wasn't much of a threat. Pan was definitely more dangerous but I saw him bragging on IRC about fighting two people and presumably winning so I felt like Pan was my best target. I still had a NAP but that gave me time to prepare and build up my army of knights and witch hunters. I went evo pretty early on but then beelined for const6. Lightless lanterns really helped boost my research and I was able to get high conjuration for angel summons and enchantment for eternal pyre. I forget the timeline exactly but before I attacked, Pan dealt some heavy blows to Pythium, stealing or killing many of his mages. Pythium had an amazing throne, the throne of water or something, that gave 3 water gems, 3 defense skill on bless and allowed recruitment of hydromancers, amphibious W3s. I wanted that throne real bad but Pan took it from him and never built a fort on it. I think I recruited some amphibious mercs but somehow I took the 3 adjacent water provinces, one of which had mermen. Pan only left a bit of PD so even lovely mermen could take it. I ended up propheting the merman commander so I could get the throne. Pan never took it back since he was probably busy fighting me and Man in other parts of the world. Pythium went AI around this time so I built some crappy indies and recruited mercs to siege his cap since my main forces had to fight through Pan to get there unless they could swim. I did really well against Pan, he never used any blood magic or any devastating spells. His pretender was some crappy sphinx or something with a4 iirc. Dryads were annoying but I killed a bunch once I put some bodyguards on my mages. Some of my infantry get the bodyguard skill too so they were perfect. Hilariously enough, one merc commander killed 3 dryads in one turn because he was a D2 and just cast horde of skeletons over and over. By that point, Pan was pretty much dead although he was sieging Man's capital at one point. I also witnessed the saddest battle I've ever seen in my life. Man's pretender was a hooded spirit with some magic paths at 4 or 5 or something and was trying to solo cap a province. He cast a bunch of buffs and then went to town....with his fist. It was like, 3 PD and the pretender lost because he ended up doing no damage. I think he lost due to a morale check or something because there was no way he was actually going to die with liquid body and other buffs. I offered to make him a fire brand after that. So after beating Pan, I was in a really good position. I had a level 2 throne from Ashdod and 2 level 2s from Pan leaving me at 6 points with only 10 needed to win. The water throne gave me recruitable W3 and I empowered one to W3D1 so I could then summon W3D3 naiads. I could also summon A3 or F4 angels. Both 3 point thrones still had their indies but they were scary. One had a zeus with spring hawks, the other was a fire pretender with various fire summons. Mictlan also had a level 1 throne on my border so taking that and either of the 3 point ones would give me the win. As I was mopping up Pan and Pythium, Mictlan went AI for some reason so I moved on the throne. Then, as I was preparing my forces to go for the 3 point throne, the dastardly Eriu attacked! What an rear end in a top hat attacking me several turns before I attacked him. It was a hell of an attack too. He probably had 20 sidhe lords, each with a frost brand and vine shield. Some of them even had water breathing stuff and were taking my water provinces. I lost a ton of provinces in that first attack but I slowly fought back. Nothing could stop my serious armies until I ran into one of his serious armies. Rain of stones killed all my mages and thunder strikes did the rest. His sidhe lords were still rampaging around but several of my mages with some troops to back them up could take them out without much problem. I did waste quite a few mages throwing them into his actually good armies and of course I couldn't see where they were because glamour. My pretender died in one of those attacks because he took a lightning bolt on turn 1 and went berserk. If he had been able to get off strength of gaia, he might've lived but he charged way into the enemy troops. I also stupidly lost an angel I empowered up to A4 and equipped with air boosters because for some reason I scripted her to melee or something. That really sucked. That didn't stop me though. By this point I had two F6 angels and another A3 angel plus a couple dozen mages and over a hundred sacreds and miscellaneous troops. With this massive stack, I cast fire storm and heat from hell plus fog warriors. Fog warriors probably wasn't worth it because the fire storm removed it but it still helped a bit. With regeneration, my sacreds could shrug off firestorm anyhow. I moved closer to the throne with this doomstack and pretty handily defeated the army Eriu sent and went on to tear apart the throne defenders. The spring hawks killed the merc chaff I brought but fire pillars and fire storm took care of them easily in a couple of turns. And with that, I won the game. I still feel like it was more luck than anything else. I worked together with Eriu to team up against neighbors but nobody ever attacked me until Eriu right at the end so I had free reign to pick and choose my targets. Anyway, here are the graphs. Surprisingly, Eriu had better research than I did even with my lightless lanterns and cheapo researchers but you can see how beastly my income and gem income were. Eternal pyre helped with that plus you can see where I cast acashic record on two separate thrones on back to back turns.        This is what my average sacred looked like:  I had over a hundred of them.
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May 2, 2017 03:44
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Never trust the vile Spanish IMO.
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May 2, 2017 03:58
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No Snek was a lot of fun. I signed up for it partly because I wanted to see first hand how a mapgen map played and partly because I wanted to play around with thugs. Lots of thugs. So many thugs. My pretender:  I had a very simple plan that went pretty much as expected: beeline Mother Oak, beeline Construction 4 (vine shields & frost brands), and beeline GoH. Kill a couple of people along the way with my beastly midgame and then hope that Enchanted Forests can carry me at the end. It almost worked; if I'd been able to hit Tagichatn half a year earlier, who knows? Unfortunately Pan crumbled too quickly and I couldn't get out of Agartha in time to nip Tagi's economy in the bud. My raiding and invasions still did an absurd amount of economic damage - you can see the flip on the graphs - but I couldn't siege down his forts. The onion around the thrones was just too thick, and it didn't really matter that I was making progress on non-critical fronts. Endgame shots from my perspective:   What surprised me was how much I enjoyed playing Eriu, especially with this pretender build. I would go so far as saying that they're my current favorite nation: they have a very simple game plan, with limited magic paths, but it's by no means a bad plan. Air magic is really good, and water/nature/earth have huge utility as off-paths. Not to mention that Eriu's troops are very solid. They're not up to fighting mass sacred knights in the late game, but Fir Bolg are extremely solid infantry. Early and midgame, glamour/mistform thugs and cap-recruit glamour infantry do superb work. Plus, unlike certain other ponyman nations, Eriu has legit bard-based research (as you can see on the graphs), allowing you to actually reach those late-game buffs and summons. They're a complete package whose only weakness is, IMO, a lack of late-game powerhouse strategies (blood, death, communions, cheap battle mages, recruit-anywhere sacred spam, etc.). They never really get bad in the late game, just... less amazing. I was quite pleased with the map, too. It resulted in a bunch of interesting decision making, both tactical and strategic, as well as encouraging conflict at every turn. If this is representative then I doubt that I'll be making many gameplay changes to make to the map generator (though continue to give feedback if there is something that needs to be addressed!). Corbeau fucked around with this message at 04:15 on May 2, 2017 |
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May 2, 2017 04:03
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I feel less bad about going AI to see that you immediately won afterward. I was Man in that aforementioned scenario. My Pretender REALLY liked going off script. I had other buffs he was supposed to cast, namely that earth one that actually makes his fists into weapons, but the mother fucker WOULD NEVER CAST IT, no matter where it was in the scripting. So usually he'd cast his other buffs, fire off a Bone Melter or two, and then slap the opposing PD while, presumably, screaming something like "NO FAIR! I'M GONNA TELL MOM" As you can see from my graphs, aside from very, VERY early on, I was pretty much hosed all game. Part of that was Pan deciding to invade me for no real reason, aside from, presumably, me being Man. Rather than give in and go AI, I suffocated him in Chaff and an annoying teleporting pretender God with Dom 10 raiding anywhere I wanted at will. This game taught me the value of setting troops to "Guard commander" (gently caress Dryads) and the value of having a random supply of Chaff in the front off to a corner or another away from your archers (gently caress Harpies). I was giving Pan a lot of trouble with random bullshit indy units, particularly Lion Tribe Archers, which is funny because Man's Longbows are supposed to be great. Well, depending on targets (harpies), maybe cheaper is sometimes better. This game started with me trying to field test my Dom 10 Hooded Messenger build. I wanted to see if I could rush-dom-kill someone and take their starting province for a handy early lead. Monkeys caught on to my plan and asked me to leave his territory. "I know your pretender his here. Kindly tell him to gently caress off." .....by that time, I had already had about 8 priests, my prophet AND my pretender in his territory. Dom 10 Hooded Messenger is funny as hell, but probably needs a bit more luck early on with finding an enemy capital. I wasted two good turns that I could have been putting to use Dom-killing the Monkeys. Who knows what would have happened had I been pulling that bullshit on, say, Pythium, instead, that game. I also was completely unaware that somehow, Pythium got hosed up completely and died and went AI like, super early, to Pan, despite being on my opposite border. That was disheartening. I kept trying to dom Kill Pan while he was invading my homelands. I suspect that, had he not had success on his Western front, this would have actually worked. Mother fucker just had more provinces than I thought he did, and while I have infinite invisible priests being dicks, there's only so much they (and 200 GP temples) can do. Someone finally showed me the bad news in map form and I realized I had no hope of an actual Dom kill and needed to have someone else Invade Pan, for like, realsies, if I wanted him to actually die like the flea-ridden weed orgy that nation is. All that said, despite never really being a contender, this was one of the more fun rounds of Dominions I've ever had. EA Man is, if not good, at least a lot of fun, and I found myself thinking out things often, trying to figure out how to kill Pan's hordes with an army of shittier troops. Good War, Jsoh.
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May 2, 2017 04:31
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Pan also gets access to 200 gp temples, and all the dryads they want to stockpile are H2s as well. Domkilling that nation is extremely difficult to do if they're remotely paying attention. Plus harpies are really good patrollers and, given Pan has Blood access, they'll normally eventually be setting up patrol groups for hunters even if they don't suspect stealthed units, which hurts invisible preaching even more.
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May 2, 2017 04:44
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Corbeau posted:Summoned the gumption for a bit of mountain province work before dinner: Keeps looking better and better
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May 2, 2017 21:04
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NoSnek I am very pleasantly surprised to see myself come in a very respectable third place on those score graphs, as MA Shinuyama no less. I have been making it a point to only pick nations I have never played before whenever I sign up for a game. I have played a lot of single player Dominions, but I traditionally found myself always playing the same nations. It has been very good for my game to stretch out and experience other strategies. Looking at what Shinuyama had going for it, it was clear that the name of the game was summons. I looked through each of the national summons, and most of them are garbage. In my initial research and testing, I decided that flying sacred lightning throwing bird people sounded pretty cool, and Shinuyama has access to a couple different flavors.  Karasu Tengu These guys are the earliest bird people you can get access to coming at conjuration 2. The only problem is perversely they require paths you don't have access to without summoning. Looking around for how to get ahold of N1A1 I ended up making out like a god drat bandit, expanding into 3 separate Deer Tribe provinces. While Deer Tribe Shaman only have a 10% chance of getting the A1 path, when you are building three a turn you are bound to get a couple. By the end of the game I had 5 Karasu Tengu summoning shaman, and I had them spawning 3 bird samurai a turn. These guys did some really great work for me, but they die a lot. I think they might have been better off with more of a blessing to help their survivability (water or earth), but they still ended up being a great way to dump nature gems. At least until I started putting out a Bane Lord with Frostbrand and VineShield every turn.  Dai Tengu These were the bird people I was really after, a good Air mage who can fly and lead my bird samurai around and cast storm for them. Unfortunately the Pankreator giveth, and the Pankreator taketh away. While I was blessed with a superabundance of Deer Tribe, I didn't find a single air site in my territory the entire game. I only ever got to summon one of these guys. He managed to do some work, but I didn't get storm researched in time before he died due to poor scripting on my part. I decided to alchemize my gems to get Well of Misery up, and shift into Dai Oni before ever thinking about getting 55 air gems together again. He also comes with some friends:  Kohona Tengu These guys are a little worse than the Karasu Tengu, I guess their pants slow them down. But they come with air gems, and are obviously what your Dai Tengu should be summoning, since unlike the Karasu Tengu they scale with Air paths. Not that A1E1 are paths you can get without summons either. And  Tengu Warriors Armored Tengu, I sure wish I could summon these guys on their own, but they are nice while they last. Since I am writing this at work, I don't actually have a picture of my god, but Rainbow Bakemono Roll was an asleep Celestial General with A4S4E2N2, I took Luck, Heat and Order. The idea was for him to come online after my initial expansion and site search up the huge amounts of gems I would need for my summons. I waffled around with other pretenders, but ended up deciding that the Astral paths were key. I ended up doing so much alchemizing, having the high pearl income ended up being super useful. I did however manage to get him killed shortly after he woke up attacking a throne, he got petrified and murdered during an HP route. I brought him back to life eventually but with only H1 priests it took a while. Since I didn't want to put all my (bird samurai) eggs in one basket, and since I sure wouldn't have a summoning engine online for early game expansion, I had to figure out which of my national units were least bad.  Dai Bakemono I ended up maxing out my resources in every fort almost every turn for the first three years of the game building these guys. Just huge piles of 21 HP Prot 17 Str 16 guys with two handed swords. They are very expensive, but by and large they just don't die after you have a critical mass of them. I found I was able to clear indys pretty reliably once I had about 9, and once you had a stack of 20 you typically didn't take losses either. To help my Dai Bakemono scale up and survive in later battles I was chasing them around with these guys.  Bakemono Sorcerer Very expensive and Slow To Recruit, but they are recruit anywhere. On turns where RNG (and Luck 3) gave me piles and piles of gold to burn, I would kick these off in as many forts as possible. About half of them come with earth 3, and for the ones who don't it is easy to give them boots. I would have them do the typical Strength of Giants/Legions of Steel just to have my Dai Bakemono win more. These guys were also critical for my death magic, since I didn't take any on my pretender. I got real lucky and had one roll a natural D4 in year two, once he had a skull staff and skull hat we were ready to go. While I ended up not being very influential in the end of the game, I had a short war with Agartha, where I got absolutely destroyed by their god and excellent scripting, but then Eriu got involved, and ended up taking Agartha's provinces which were on my border, pretty much ending that conflict. Next I ended up attacking Bandar Log, he put up a good fight, but unfortunately for him, I had a huge pile of useless water gems that I had turned into demons at the front of my army. And those useless bastards soaked up most of his F9 falling fires. If those had been landing on my good troops I would have been screwed. Also I was lucky to have my border be only two provinces away from his cap, so I was able to make a bee line for it. I also regret not paying more attention to other players turns. Ashdod was one of my neighbors, and it took me almost two turns to notice that he had been set to AI, so I lost some key choke points to Mictalin. Who also went AI without me noticing for several turns. Oh and I found the Labyrinth magic site which let me recruit minotaurs, I used about 20 of them and a plain jane commander to take most of AI Mictalins territory. Also Dai Bakemono's high strength and massed Tengu's flying really make sieges go quick.
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May 2, 2017 23:38
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My opinion on Bakemono Sorcerers is that you end up paying a bunch for paths and combat stats that you don't need. Dai Bakemono are really good I agree. It'd be nice if they were 2-3g and 5-7r cheaper, tho.
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May 3, 2017 03:53
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| # ? May 20, 2024 09:37 |
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Does anyone - anyone - think indie zotz are a good thing to have in this game? Because I'm tempted to do cave province indies manually rather than risking another game setup without the no indie zotz mod.
Corbeau fucked around with this message at 08:34 on May 3, 2017 |
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May 3, 2017 08:24
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