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Old Man of the Sea, Titan of the Sea, Father of Monsters, etc can all bring land units into water. I can't find a unit that can bring water units to land, which I believe is the key issue.
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May 3, 2017 18:43
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I ride bikes all day posted:Old Man of the Sea, Titan of the Sea, Father of Monsters, etc can all bring land units into water. I can't find a unit that can bring water units to land, which I believe is the key issue. Oh, yes, you're absolutely right, that effect doesn't exist at all. I misread the original post that sparked this discussion with him talking later in the same post about getting into the sea. But yes, getting out of it is the even bigger issue and there are no real ways to alleviate that.
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May 3, 2017 18:53
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jBrereton posted:No. I ride bikes all day posted:Old Man of the Sea, Titan of the Sea, Father of Monsters, etc can all bring land units into water. I can't find a unit that can bring water units to land, which I believe is the key issue. With that being the case, maybe a new item could be created that's basically a copy of Amulet of the Fish, except much cheaper, constructable at construction 0 with W1, and accessible only to UW nations. It could have a secondary penalty if that would be too effective, but it seems like a simple enough solution. e: Base cost can't be reduced to lower than 5 of a given gem type, but that still seems fine? Even considering the cost in unit turns this approach would need versus a given commander starting with the ability, it would still make things much easier for an underwater nation. Hiveminded fucked around with this message at 20:03 on May 3, 2017 |
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May 3, 2017 19:28
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To me the biggest problem with underwater nations is that there isn't a giant shark pretender. Why isn't there a giant shark pretender?!
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May 4, 2017 07:03
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Hiveminded posted:With that being the case, maybe a new item could be created that's basically a copy of Amulet of the Fish, except much cheaper, constructable at construction 0 with W1, and accessible only to UW nations. It could have a secondary penalty if that would be too effective, but it seems like a simple enough solution. Honestly may as well make it accessible to everyone. Going from ocean -> land isn't exactly gamebreaking.
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May 4, 2017 07:48
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Dirk the Average posted:Honestly may as well make it accessible to everyone. Going from ocean -> land isn't exactly gamebreaking. I've been playing a multiplayer game as EA R'lyeh recently and if I had an item that allowed me to bring my UW only troops on land during the early game I would be able to raise way more hell than would be fair. Honestly an amulet of the fish that didn't require air gems or air paths would be enough. MagicBoots fucked around with this message at 08:33 on May 4, 2017 |
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May 4, 2017 08:29
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Leperflesh posted:Which you'd never ever rely on because if the water nation dispels that global or it gets replaced, whoops every airbreather currently underwater dies. If you used transformation events, then your current land tritons would remain, but you wouldn't get more if the global went down
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May 4, 2017 14:45
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LordNagash posted:To me the biggest problem with underwater nations is that there isn't a giant shark pretender. Why isn't there a giant shark pretender?! That's a pretty ridiculous oversight, considering Hawaiian mythology already has shark gods.
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May 5, 2017 00:02
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Turn 90 Turn 90 begins with a message from our good friend Bogarus:  Ramc is being sassy, but beneath the humor there lies the distinct possibility that Caelum will betray us. We’re currently blasting our Dominion across the world through mighty loving amounts of blood sacrifices, and Caelum has been hit pretty hard. So far we’ve managed to remain cordial allies, but everybody has a breaking point. Anyway, I’m going to just treat this as fun sass, Libluini has given no indication that he’s stressing out re: our alliance (unlike Mr. Pangaea). Otherwise we cast the usual poo poo. Great news: I (lazily) forgot to order my montly remote site-searchers to stop casting their spells, so another one tried to scry Fas Dir and got hit by flames and burned down the laboratory in his province. His province happens to be the same one that our Golem creating mages are sitting in, so there will be no Golems built this turn.  Moving right along to battles: we only have 3 reports, and two of them are of Bogarus using his own Vampires to retake territory that Caelum took earlier:   Bogarus' Vampires are just as effective as ours! Bogarus is certainly building a fine little Vampire force, to be sure. In a standard game of Dominions 4 that would be a horrifyingly huge Vampire army. We, however, have so many Vampire Lords that I’ve lost track of them, and we have hundreds upon hundreds of lesser Vampires (with more summoned every turn). I’m not worried about Bogarus’ (or anybody else’s) Vampires. We can blood sacrifice, we can push our Dominion at will. Make no mistake: we are the Vampire power in this game. The only battle we’re involved in is the second storming of the fort in Banded Hills. Remember that I decided to throw a handful of Vampire Lords and ~50 Vampires into the grinder last turn just to keep the enemy on their toes, and with no expectation of victory. So, let’s see how many defenders we killed before our forces died:  We're back! Bogarus casts Mass Regeneration, like last time, but there’s no Fog Warriors, no clever rescripting of his communion:  Nor is there a Mass Enslave casting Golem. Our Vampires fly in and eat up the Troll chaff, even in their extra-regenerative state. The Astrapelagists hurl some lightning bolts and send a few of our Vampires to Limbo but there’s really no contest:    Well! That was easy! I’ll take a victory any day, even if it was kind of handed to me. Our new province of Banded Hills has a few gem sites and two (!) gold mines, giving us a total of +1D, +1A, +1F, and +100 gold a turn. Pretty great! Most of the forces in Banded Hills are moving to either press further into Bogarussian territory or to reinforce the siege at The Cracked Earth nearby. There was one goofy event of slight note this turn: we got attacked by Sea Dogs in one of our provinces adjacent to the small formerly Xibalban lake:  Uh oh! The stupid, useless Sea Dogs bravely charge towards our PD:    :iamafag: Perhaps they shouldn’t have chosen to attack the one province where we've been summoning hundreds of demons! The final message of the turn let’s us all know that Ragha has finally been vanquished from the game:  What a waste for Ragha. Such insane potential in a Mo Money game. RIP, overpowered bullshit DLC nation. You will be missed. OK! What’s our plan going into next turn? Well, we’re currently sieging the fort in Utevania with our New Model Army of Golems & Friends, so we await Bogarus’ response to that. We’re also going to send a mundane army of sacreds into Bogarus’ province of Zeburia, adjacent to Ferra. I don’t want to lose our momentum, and want to keep Bogarus guessing.  We could lose this army and not even blink. The Might of Zionism is going to cast this high-level Blood spell, for lack of better things to do. Improved Crossbreeding is a spell that is thematically really cool, but as far as I'm aware is quite poo poo in practice. However, it is super cheap and scales extremely well with high level Blood mages, so for lack of anything better to do we're going to experiment and see if anything fun happens!  We’ll forge another artifact as well, this one is a 2 handed Fire booster item:  We’ll continue to summon Vampire Lords in preparation for war with Pangaea. I know it’s coming, but I really hope that it won’t be until Bogarus is truly crippled. If war with Pan starts while Bogarus is still viable then we’ll be in the poo poo. I think we can beat Pangaea as long as we don’t have to split our resources against an equally difficult opponent. Let’s see what the next turn brings! How are u fucked around with this message at 00:31 on May 5, 2017 |
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May 5, 2017 00:24
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Love the constantly-escalating paranoia
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May 5, 2017 01:31
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I love Dominions' mythology. 'Yeah, there was a branch stuck in the sun. See? Here it is.' Edit: What does Temporary Fire Gems do? Do they just get a free fire gem when in combat to do all the fire gem tricks with? Prism fucked around with this message at 01:32 on May 5, 2017 |
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May 5, 2017 01:30
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Prism posted:I love Dominions' mythology. Temporary Gems are just gems that you get, for free, every battle. So, with an item like a Clam of Pearls, a mage will get 2 Astral Pearls in his inventory every battle no matter what. The Staff of the Sun grants 1 Fire gem per battle.
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May 5, 2017 02:24
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Is that staff a unique? Or can you potentially have 50 branches that fell off the sun?
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May 5, 2017 04:22
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Glazius posted:Is that staff a unique? Or can you potentially have 50 branches that fell off the sun? It's an Artifact, so it's Unique.
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May 5, 2017 04:26
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Are temp gems all that useful? I can't imagine you'll get much done with just a single free fire gem, especially in a Mo Money game.
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May 5, 2017 04:26
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Gems can be handed out to your dudes only in your own labs. So when you send an army out to go fight, you need to give all your mages a supply of gems so they can cast spells they're scripted to cast. If they might fight two times, you need double the gems. Three fights? Three times the gems. Unfortunately, because Dominions, mages have a nasty habit of using extra gems you give them to do stupid poo poo. Like, they can waste a gem just to reduce the fatigue of a spell they're already casting. Which OK if you really needed that, but usually you accounted for fatigue when you wrote their script! You can tell each mage to be conservative with gem use and that improves things, but they can still waste their gems. So one way around that is to accompany the army with someone whose job is to just schlep gems. Any commander can carry gems, so give a big stockpile to (say) a scout who isn't even going to attack and whose script is to just hide in the back and run away, and then after each battle, redistribute the gems using Dominions' incredibly, fantastically, just mind-blowingly stupid gem-transfer system it uses when you're not in a lab province (select one commander in your army and select his gems and the game picks one other commander in that army to whom you can hand the gems. It's always the same one, but it's not a 1:1 ratio, so first Bob hands his gems to Joe, then Joe hands his gems to Amy, then maybe Amy has Joe as her trading partner even though you're trying to get the loving gems to Sally? Arrrgh So yeah temporary gems are fabulous. Script your mage to cast one spell that needs a gem, he'll use that temporary gem and you never need to equip him with more gems. e. In this game, HowAreU has the advantage of having fuckloads of flying commanders who he can easily send out from nearby labs to deliver piles of gems if an army runs low on something. So the above is mitigated somewhat by that. But only a little. And doing this is still yet more loving micromanagement.
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May 5, 2017 05:27
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If you click on the second commander, you get a list of all your commanders in that province and you can hand off your gems to the right one immediately. OK, it's still kind of hard to select the right commander from that list and if you have something like an army scripted for elemental-spam, resupplying everyone is still incredibly tedious, but it's not quite that insane. And at least Dom4 has the option of straight-up forbidding mages to use gems outside of their scripting. Does it work reliably? Well, nope. But it helps!
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May 5, 2017 07:07
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Wait, you can do that? ...gently caress
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May 5, 2017 08:22
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I think that's the third time this single thread had a conversation go "you need to do this, but it is really tedious because of Dom 4's terribad UI" "actually, there's a shortcut for that, you do it this way" "gently caress, really". It's like it's the all-time reigning champion in the Bad UI International Competitions.
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May 5, 2017 08:41
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Well, it's not quite SAP yet but it's got legs.
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May 5, 2017 10:09
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A lot of these conflicts seem pretty much decided from day one by the preparation that one or the other of the participants made long before the battle ever happened. How often does someone in a Dom4 game actually manage an upset via clever strategy once they've been put on the back foot?
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May 5, 2017 14:45
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While going into a conflict with a good plan from a position of power gives you heavy advantage, yes, comebacks and turnarounds are hardly unheard of. In the LP's alone, there's several examples of smaller powers winning against larger, wealthier foes. Granted, this doesn't always translate into winning the game (since you usually then have several OTHER stronger powers to fight), but winning a fight as the underdog is always satisfying, and the number of options available in Dominions open up the opportunities for it to occur. I don't play Dom 4 (and only dabbled in 3) so I can't comment on THE META as it stands, admittedly.
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May 5, 2017 16:28
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SIGSEGV posted:SAP We don't use that word in friendly company, sir.
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May 5, 2017 16:28
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PurpleXVI posted:A lot of these conflicts seem pretty much decided from day one by the preparation that one or the other of the participants made long before the battle ever happened. In one of the first couple of games I ever played I, playing MA Agartha, got pushed back to ~4 provinces (my cap, a couple random provinces, and my first fort) by a end of year 1 rush from an aggressive player playing LA Atlantis with a Water 9 bless and an awake Dragon. He was an idiot and instead of finishing me off he invaded another neighbor, giving me just enough time to summon some units, defensive trap kill his dragon, and then retake all my land + his and go on to eventually win the game. I got pretty lucky!
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May 5, 2017 16:45
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Timely preparation is definitely one of the most important things. If you have the tactics you need ready and you're able to wield them and you're already prepared to adapt to potential counters and you have this ready to go while the opponent is still preparing then you'll probably win. That doesn't mean there isn't potential, though. A lot of nations count on a turnaround against rush nations once their early game battlemagic is researched, for example, to varying degrees of effectiveness.
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May 5, 2017 17:49
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Is Spell Casting AI less worried about wasting gems if those gems to happen to be temp gems?
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May 5, 2017 18:28
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PurpleXVI posted:A lot of these conflicts seem pretty much decided from day one by the preparation that one or the other of the participants made long before the battle ever happened. Depending on the throne point settings you can sometimes snake a victory even if you aren't the leader in other respects. I've done this a few times when the ostensible game leader would have taken me out in a protracted battle.
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May 5, 2017 19:00
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Cimbri posted:Wait, you can do that? ...gently caress agghh at least I've only wasted maybe 10 hours of my life doing this since I've only played 3 mp games so far.
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May 5, 2017 19:15
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Ramc posted:Depending on the throne point settings you can sometimes snake a victory even if you aren't the leader in other respects. I've done this a few times when the ostensible game leader would have taken me out in a protracted battle. Isn't this what the thrones were designed for? Make the endgame both less inevitable and less protracted? I have to say they make the games a lot more colorful and interesting as a spectator. It also helps that the endgame is no longer consistently tartarian factory vs tartarian factory. I'd like to see a game without blood magic because it seems to drown out what could be some very interesting noise.
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May 6, 2017 05:15
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Araganzar posted:Isn't this what the thrones were designed for? Make the endgame both less inevitable and less protracted? Yeah, blood magic is far too strong. There were multiple games I could have won in the past, if it weren't for my disgust with using blood magic. Somehow I always find excuses to either not use it at all, or as sparingly as possible.
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May 6, 2017 08:46
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One way to turn the game, is if you are only a few thrones from victory, to empty out every mage from your forts abandoning research and rush those thrones. Hopefully by the time your opponents find out it would take them 5-6 turns to get their mages to the thrones if they wanted to do the same. Suddenly having 3 armies of 20 mages spamming aoe armor piercing/neutralizing spells/skeletons/elementals etc can turn alot of fights in your favor. Obviously a high risk strategy as you can lose a tonne of mages to rain of stones/earthquake/battlefield damage enchantments and so on. In addition you fall behind on research if you dont win quickly. The trick is to try and catch someone unprepared who doesn't have the research to handle mass mages as thats not what they were expecting to fight. This can also happen in the mid game, i.e its turn 50, you need 5 thrones to win and have 2. A neighbour of yours AIs and you claim a throne 3 provinces deep in their lands. You can then rush the top two players who are much stronger than you but have their troops on another front and still have most of their mages in labs researching, claiming a throne in each of their provinces. You can go all in on those fights too, spending all your gems on random chaff, handing out gems to mages just to reduce their fatigue and let them cast a few more evocations in the big important battles. Applebee123 fucked around with this message at 09:11 on May 6, 2017 |
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May 6, 2017 08:54
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No thread don't die. We're so close.
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May 12, 2017 14:10
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Bo-Pepper posted:No thread don't die. We're so close. 
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May 12, 2017 14:27
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Don't worry friends, the thread isn't dead. I was out of town last weekend but there will be updates this weekend!
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May 12, 2017 14:34
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How are u posted:Don't worry friends, the thread isn't dead. I was out of town last weekend but there will be updates this weekend! Uh... poo poo, maybe I should stop playing Stellaris like it's computer crack and go back to making more videos, too
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May 12, 2017 19:44
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Applebee123 posted:One way to turn the game, is if you are only a few thrones from victory, to empty out every mage from your forts abandoning research and rush those thrones. Hopefully by the time your opponents find out it would take them 5-6 turns to get their mages to the thrones if they wanted to do the same.
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May 12, 2017 19:52
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Turn 91 Turn 91 does not begin with a research breakthrough, even though I thought we’d be hitting Thaumaturgy 9 this turn. I was dumb and missed the threshold by 66 RP, so we’ll get that next turn. We do have a message from Bogarus!  What could he be up to?? Another vauge threat implying terrible consequences for those of us who are invading him. Hmm, well, the last few messages like this didn’t result in anything to terrible, so we’ll just continue per usual until something new happens. There’s a second message! I sent a global message last turn in response to Bogarus’ previous one:  Diplomacy! We cast all of our regular spells, as usual. One thing to note is that the Horror Seeds we’ve been throwing at Pangaea’s capitol are still successfully hitting targets. So, we can safely say that the Celestial Rainbow does not protect against Horror Seed. Maybe it only deflects direct damage spells? Maybe it is just broken. Here’s something fun: we had The Might of Zionism cast the Blood 8 spell ‘Improved Crossbreeding’, just to see what happens.  We get a bunch of lovely foulspawn like these guys:   But also a couple of cool monsters like this:  Neat! It’s a 20 slave spell (virtually free for us, at this point) and it summons a bunch of chaff, so I think I’ll have our Pretender fill some of our Throne forts with foulspawn chaff. There were a couple of battles of interest this turn, only one of which we were directly involved in. That battle was a big bunch of our Vampires flying over to Bogarus’ province of Wise Spring Grove and slaughtering the PD:  Just another day in Vampire World. We put the fort to siege, and we’ll move some more substantial troops and mages over eventually. The other two battles are ones that we were indirectly involved in! First, a scout catches Pangaea attacking an independent Lesser Horror:    We can see on the strategic map that the Horror is sieging Pan’s fort in Marshlands. There are very few reasons that a Horror would manifest on the map and attack a province entirely on its own. There may be some scripted events that cause this, but I am 100% certain that it is the result of our Horror Seeding. When a Horror Seeded unit dies the Horror inside manifests and attacks the province, and if it wins the battle it will stick around until it is killed, unlike the Horrors that are derived from the spell Send Horror. The second battle is even more proof. We scouted a battle between Caelum and Bogarus in the province of Venna. Venna was a Bogarussian province that Caelum took, and in this battle Bogarus is attacking to take it back. Here’s the Bogarus attacking force:  Bogarussian Vampires. I hate Bogarussian Vampires. A whole shitload of Vampires. Bogarus is using Vampires because he still has Dominion in Venna. The Caelan defending force is made up of probably 30 points of PD plus two special dudes:     Interesting! A few days ago during the previous turn Libluini was telling me about how he’d put together a special Vampire-killing force to combat Bogarus’ growing Vampire army. These guys are certainly just that. The defenders get the first round, and Caelum’s mages cast Living Fire (to summon a bunch of Fire Elementals) and Fire Storm:  So yes, this is definitely a Vampire purge squad. Vampires hate fire, so Fire Elementals are great to use to tank them. Fire Storm is an extremely powerful spell to use against anything without Fire Resistance, and Vampires have Weakness to Fire so it’s extra great. The handful of Caelum’s PD that is made up of national bird-men fly forward and engage the powerful Vampire Lord who is standing in front of the rest of the army:   They kill it. A bunch of Caelum’s national troops have Ice Lances, which are magical weapons, which ignore Vampires’ Invulnerability. That’s pretty great. On Bogarus’ first round his Vampire Lords cast Life for Life (single-target massive damage spell that’s great against thugs and super combatants but not useful at all for fighting armies) and summon some skeletons. The lesser Vampires fly into combat. Now, remember that we had thrown some Horror Seeds at this Vampire squad a few turns ago. Look at this Vampire here:  The Horror Mark means that he’s been hit by the Seed. Now see what happens when the Fire Storm ‘ticks’ for the first time and kills a bunch of Vampires, including that guy:  :iamafag: Boom. Instant Greater Horror. The Horror immediately begins attacking the Vampires that surround it. For a few rounds of battle the Fire Storm continues to blow up Vampires, even releasing a second Greater Horror from some other Seeded individual. Eventually, the lesser Vampires rout and flee the field. As soon as that happens, to my dismay, the remaining Horror flies straight to the back of the field and instantly murders both of Caelum’s tricked-out mages:   Final results for the battle:  Vampires are OP, yo. None of the Vampires count as dead because the battle took place in Bogarus’ Dominion. Caelum lost two dudes he said he’d been making an effort to create. I’m sure he’s not happy about it. Even a cursory look at this battle should make it obvious that Horror Seeding is occurring. Nobody has confronted me about it yet, but I’ll have to assume that people know about it from now on. Dumb random event of the turn:    Next turn we are attacking two more of Bogarus’ provinces! We’ll be moving onto Boggiton and Zeburia with armies of sacred Levites and Gibborim. If those attacks are successful we will have 5 Bogarussian provinces under siege, and I hope that’s not an over-reach. We’re also sending a scout to ping the fort in The Cracked Earth, so hopefully we’ll be able to take that fort soon. The war plods forward, one step at a time!  We advance slowly, but ferociously!
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May 12, 2017 22:50
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Mo Money sounds tedious enough to deal with in the first place and I feel like something like horror seeds would speed up people burning out. Like I would just be like alright I'm done you can have fun playing with yourself and walk away but then again I have the fortitude of a baby
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May 12, 2017 23:01
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Hahaha, that random event is just perfection; it doesn't get much more Dominions than randomly having some army-shuffling peon get transmogrified into a horrible but mostly useless monster for no particular reason. Also, good to see the horror seeds doing work, even if that work is 'wait what gently caress'. Eagerly looking forward to someone spitecasting Astral Corruption and the whole drat world being sieged by recursive horror attacks.
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May 12, 2017 23:08
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I'm just waiting for the quad-cast wish for armageddon.
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May 12, 2017 23:13
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