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Wouldn’t 10 Gifts casters be 30 Geomancers? That seems a lot of mages to mass.
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May 9, 2024 07:45
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At 90 gold a pop that’s very doable.
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May 9, 2024 07:53
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The Lone Badger posted:Wouldn’t 10 Gifts casters be 30 Geomancers? That seems a lot of mages to mass. No. It takes 4 slaves for the remaining 26 geomancers to start dropping rocks right away. Will the 4 slaves survive? No. Will you care? No. For 10 masters, the 4 slaves might even survive if 2 masters spend a round casting power of the spheres and summon earthpower to boost the slave paths.
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May 9, 2024 08:01
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Didn’t realise each slave could be linked to multiple masters.
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May 9, 2024 08:05
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Yeah. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. Good because it lets you really power up your spellcasting, bad because it imposes a number of limitations on you. Communions (astral), Choirs (only available to one nation by default, can also be accessed by some angel summons), and Sabbaths (blood) are considered separate in 6, tho, so you can divide your casters accordingly. Bogarus in the late age for example suffered from the issue that they can EITHER skelespam or evocation spam with a communion without deleting their slave mages (due to conflicting paths), but in 6 they can have a regular communion for evocations and a sabbath (possibly turbo) for skelespam.
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May 9, 2024 08:24
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Sometimes I wonder if there are any 'good guys' in Dominions. I mean obviously everybody's warring to be Top God, but everything I see is all "sacrificing virgins for demon power" and "summoning ten thousand skeletons For The Trees". Is there a single nation besides Man(which I've gathered is The Boring One) where people aren't just assholes?
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May 9, 2024 10:46
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Numbus26 posted:Sometimes I wonder if there are any 'good guys' in Dominions. I mean obviously everybody's warring to be Top God, but everything I see is all "sacrificing virgins for demon power" and "summoning ten thousand skeletons For The Trees". Is there a single nation besides Man(which I've gathered is The Boring One) where people aren't just assholes? I mean you can theoretically have a non-rear end in a top hat nation, but then they fall under the sway of a Pretender-God and it's all blotting-out-the-sun and summoning-horrors-from-beyond-reality. What I'm saying is that the real monster is players. The Lone Badger fucked around with this message at 11:02 on May 9, 2024 |
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May 9, 2024 10:53
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If this game has a theme, it's that all your character and ideals and intentions will be consumed by the exigencies of a battle of all-against-all for supreme power.
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May 9, 2024 12:06
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Numbus26 posted:Sometimes I wonder if there are any 'good guys' in Dominions. I mean obviously everybody's warring to be Top God, but everything I see is all "sacrificing virgins for demon power" and "summoning ten thousand skeletons For The Trees". Is there a single nation besides Man(which I've gathered is The Boring One) where people aren't just assholes? I mean, most of the human, non-blood nations are "neutral." Like their backgrounds don't really involve any genocides, their troops aren't slaves, etc. same goes for the non-Lanka monkey nations. Arcoscephale even has free healthcare. Pangaea just wants to dance but the humans keep making noise complaints and getting their raves broken up by the cops, then in MA and LA games they also call the HOA to make Pangaea trim back their hedges and then that whole thing starts. The sea nations are also generally inoffensive except for R'lyeh that dreams of total world domination. Sceleria just uses skeletons like appliances. Like do you enjoy mowing the lawn? No. Good! Because here's a skeleton that can do it for you! He can clean out the gutters and harvest crops, too. Never you mind what he's going to use those tools for if there's a war... It's even entirely possible to prosecute an ascension war without a civilian-eating PG, and you can prosecute strategies that vaporize only enemy troops with no pillaging and raiding, you can prioritize globals that help everyone(Gift of Health, Gift of Nature's Bounty, Well of Misery, etc.) while also helping you quite a lot, they're very good spells in general. But some nations have paths that force them into other strategies, or they might simply find they're fun. Maybe it's time to summon the Ghost Cops and Robot Cops with Fata Morgana and Mechanical Militia, maybe it's time to hoover up a lot of slaves with Blood Vortex, maybe we cast Dark Slumber a few dozen times to turn a few innocent villages into angry potted plants... Generally the only nations fated to be huge assholes are blood magic nations, popkill nations and the goddamn giants. Though it's worth noting that the Dominions world, through a quirk of geology, doesn't require actually killing anyone to summon skeletons. There's a geological "skeleton strata" located some miles down which can be mined by necromancers for undead without actually harvesting fresh bones. This is why some undead are known as "longdead," because you have to dig down a "long way" to bring their bones up to the surface.
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May 9, 2024 12:19
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PurpleXVI posted:Though it's worth noting that the Dominions world, through a quirk of geology, doesn't require actually killing anyone to summon skeletons. There's a geological "skeleton strata" located some miles down which can be mined by necromancers for undead without actually harvesting fresh bones. This is why some undead are known as "longdead," because you have to dig down a "long way" to bring their bones up to the surface. Remember that this hellwar that devastates the world happens over and over and over again as the Pantokrator departs chasing the anglerfish lure and a new one is elected. I'd be surprised if there wasn't a geological corpse strata by now.
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May 9, 2024 12:25
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my dad posted:No. It takes 4 slaves for the remaining 26 geomancers to start dropping rocks right away. Will the 4 slaves survive? No. Will you care? No. Ah, the capitalism take on the workforce. Glad to see that seas and mythologies apart, blood drinking mesoamericans or ethereal roman ghosts can still shake hands on that. PurpleXVI posted:I mean, most of the human, non-blood nations are "neutral." Like their backgrounds don't really involve any genocides, their troops aren't slaves, etc. same goes for the non-Lanka monkey nations. Arcoscephale even has free healthcare. It's a trope you can find again and again in books and movies and videogames. In fact, you can even find it in real life very often. It's the "You're the good guy, cool, but if you end up losing before the bad guy then it was for nothing, so you gotta be a little bit bad too." It's one sentence, but this was actually used to justify a shitload of stuff throughout history, from anti-communism intervention to pretty gruesome stuff done by the french army during the Algerian war, and too many other examples to count. Mindopali fucked around with this message at 16:29 on May 9, 2024 |
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May 9, 2024 12:38
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Y'all can put up with gig economy imps replacing the citadel-building workface, because otherwise you're going to be working for the squid.
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May 9, 2024 12:43
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my dad posted:Bogarus in the late age for example suffered from the issue that they can EITHER skelespam or evocation spam with a communion without deleting their slave mages (due to conflicting paths), but in 6 they can have a regular communion for evocations and a sabbath (possibly turbo) for skelespam. I honestly think that the correct solution is still the same though. Bring an uniform communion of occultists for skelespam (with one of them casting power of the spheres, and one n mage casting personal regen, as you do), and then bring a banner of the northern star and kalendologists for killing things. Astral mages are just better in long-running battles because S3 mages will consistently cast good spells after the script runs out, and having turbocommunion skelespam is very good for making battles last long. Alchemists or astrapelagists are kind of better for the first 5 rounds, but after that they usually just cast crap spells. Meanwhile, every kalendologist is hitting an enemy guy every round with a save-or-die spell. (edit) Wait, I totally forgot about the communion penetration change. The ideal solution is now totally having two separate communions, one pure astral made of kalendologists and one sabbath for the skelespam. Tuna-Fish fucked around with this message at 14:54 on May 9, 2024 |
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May 9, 2024 14:50
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It is interesting how the appearance of a god just ends a lot of internal strife because, well, we're all worshiping this god now. Like Eriu the Fir Bolg textually resent and have been killed en masse by both the tuatha/side and humans, the sidhe lords mounds were disturbed and they were driven out by the humans, and then a new god shows up and welp now we're all on the same side. LA Mictlan has the Lawgiver who ended blood sacrifice in MA available as a hero and the text basically goes "yeah they outlawed blood sacrifice a while back and then the new god showed up and now we do blood again"
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May 9, 2024 15:07
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Almost all of the Pretenders are beings who suffered some kind of endless punishment under the rule of the previous Pantokrator. There's no indication that they will be any different when they're on the throne.
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May 9, 2024 15:50
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wiegieman posted:Almost all of the Pretenders are beings who suffered some kind of endless punishment under the rule of the previous Pantokrator. There's no indication that they will be any different when they're on the throne. Well, there are a couple who were explicitly given endless punishment for trying to help mortals, like "goddammit, how dare you teach these people how to make roads and boil water before drinking it, into the Doom Pits with you," so one might presume they'll get back to offering us the tempting delights of free healthcare and wifi when they're on the throne themselves.
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May 9, 2024 16:00
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PurpleXVI posted:Well, there are a couple who were explicitly given endless punishment for trying to help mortals, like "goddammit, how dare you teach these people how to make roads and boil water before drinking it, into the Doom Pits with you," so one might presume they'll get back to offering us the tempting delights of free healthcare and wifi when they're on the throne themselves. Well you know what they say about building roads and good intentions...
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May 9, 2024 16:06
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There's also a whole category of pretenders that are just powerful wizards who decided to take a crack at godhood!
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May 9, 2024 16:08
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IthilionTheBrave posted:There's also a whole category of pretenders that are just powerful wizards who decided to take a crack at godhood! Always kinda found it silly that they're extremely powerful wizards... who don't actually know any spells at the start of the game.
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May 9, 2024 16:14
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One More Fat Nerd posted:Always kinda found it silly that they're extremely powerful wizards... who don't actually know any spells at the start of the game. Maybe they know the spells and their research is just negotiating the licensing agreements to be allowed to cast them. Those astral EULA's are brutal.
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May 9, 2024 16:16
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wiegieman posted:Almost all of the Pretenders are beings who suffered some kind of endless punishment under the rule of the previous Pantokrator. There's no indication that they will be any different when they're on the throne. it's a common theme in literature that being a god inherently requires being an rear end in a top hat, and even supposedly good/moral/righteous/benevolent gods aren't necessarily nice
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May 9, 2024 16:38
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silentsnack posted:it's a common theme in literature that being a god inherently requires being an rear end in a top hat, and even supposedly good/moral/righteous/benevolent gods aren't necessarily nice
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May 9, 2024 16:45
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One More Fat Nerd posted:Always kinda found it silly that they're extremely powerful wizards... who don't actually know any spells at the start of the game. My personal lore is that the disappearance of the Pantokrator is some kind of hard reset on the structure of magic which means everyone has to figure out how it works from scratch now that the overgod is gone.
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May 9, 2024 17:19
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Since the indeps have a better understanding of magic than the nations do, I think it's more that the knowledge of magic was jealously kept and probably cursed by the pantokrator, that research while the Throne has a butt in it is risky and difficult because dodging lightning bolts is hard, and "great wizard" meant "can blast out ten stones instead of five" and Abyssia is actually notable for having developed a low tech fireball to canonically kill shittons of dragons.
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May 9, 2024 17:29
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One More Fat Nerd posted:Always kinda found it silly that they're extremely powerful wizards... who don't actually know any spells at the start of the game. I like to think of the mage pretender gods are just juiced on magical steroids. While all the other gods were from a previous era shaking off the chains the prior pantakrator put on them, our rainbow mage God was just walking around the world, looking for magical gems. I suppose they could use a powerful sigil that seals the arcane might of the gems into their body, but I like to think they just swallow X amount of gems for their appropriate level. So they don't know much magic, but centuries of swallowing magic rocks has removed their gag reflex, and therefore they should be the next god.
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May 9, 2024 18:53
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Donkringel posted:I like to think of the mage pretender gods are just juiced on magical steroids. While all the other gods were from a previous era shaking off the chains the prior pantakrator put on them, our rainbow mage God was just walking around the world, looking for magical gems. I suppose they could use a powerful sigil that seals the arcane might of the gems into their body, but I like to think they just swallow X amount of gems for their appropriate level. I suppose achieving godhood isn't that original of an idea if you're baked enough to consider eating shiny rocks for days on end in the first place. For a real life example, read Mike Tyson's biography.
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May 9, 2024 19:35
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Donkringel posted:I suppose they could use a powerful sigil that seals the arcane might of the gems into their body, but I like to think they just swallow X amount of gems for their appropriate level. I saw this post a long time ago on a genuinely great Dom5 LP by ramc, and it's been living rent-free in my head since. Jack2142 posted:The mage that found a gem site for a couple decades huffing gem dust till they got superpowers.
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May 9, 2024 21:05
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That’s where the old bathing in the blood of virgins comes in I think
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May 9, 2024 21:32
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When literal omnipotence is the prize, anything goes. You can be forgiven for unleashing a plague of horrors on the world, because if that's what lets you win, you can just wave your hand and fix it all once you're the new Pantokrator. (Or at least that's what all the Pretender Gods tell themselves to help them sleep at night.) It's also a theme that the world kinda seems to get shittier and shittier over time all on it's own. As you move from early to middle to late ages, there's less and less magic in the world, mages are weaker, and all the magical and mythical beings are dead, dying out, or disappearing from crossbreeding with humans, and a bunch of awful poo poo happens in the world: Ermor gets changed from Rome Expy to SkeletonFuckers United, the human remnants of Ermor gently caress up *again* with Sceleria and unleash a *second* undead apocalypse of Lemuria, R'lyeh has a meteor hit it and gets turned from a (relatively) normal fish nation to a gateway of maddening star horrors, Marignon becomes obsessed with occultism, demon worship, and blood sacrifice, etc. Middle age is what happens when the pretender wars don't start in the early age, and late age is what happens when it doesn't happen in the middle ages either. Once a new Pantokrator appears, he waves his hand and resets everything back to the Early Age where magic is abundant and everything is awesome, until he eventually disappears and the whole cycle repeats again.
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May 9, 2024 21:43
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The Lone Badger posted:Wouldn’t 10 Gifts casters be 30 Geomancers? That seems a lot of mages to mass. Forgive me if I misexplain this but I'll just take this as a chance to zoom way out and explain what the hell a communion is. If a mage casts Communion Master, they become a Communion Master. If a mage casts Communion Slave, they become a Communion Slave. All mages who are labeled as Masters are all in one big bucket together of Masters, and all Slaves go into one big bucket for Slaves. The Masters get a bonus to their existing paths per this chart  Fatigue is distributed between the Master and the entire pool of Slaves, so a 100 fatigue spell cast by a Master with 4 Slaves will give 20 fatigue to all 5 (there's also a multiplier to this based on Slave paths but it's a little more detailed than I want to get into here). There's also a cool effect where if a Master casts a self buff (like, say, Summon Earthpower), that buff is applied to all Slaves. Earthpower is a particularly good one since it would reduce the fatigue costs of a lot of spells and give the Slaves more fatigue recovery. Anyway the big thing I just wanted to highlight is that there isn't one communion per communion master, its one big communion. As other posters have alluded to, Sabbaths have all the functions of Communions but they are segregated and have different spells. I'll follow up my amateur explanations with a stupid question: TC should be able to make Matrices, right? Or is that just a bad plan?
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May 9, 2024 23:19
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You'll make matrices to plug your alchemists into your communions to cast big spells your geomancers can't, yes.
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May 9, 2024 23:26
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Tulip posted:]There's also a cool effect where if a Master casts a self buff (like, say, Summon Earthpower), that buff is applied to all Slaves. Earthpower is a particularly good one since it would reduce the fatigue costs of a lot of spells and give the Slaves more fatigue recovery. Moment of silence for old Linebacker communions. You see, way back in Dominions 3 the rules for what slaves could do were a little screwy. Specifically, they could not act if a master had acted previously in the round. However, the order in which commanders acted were determined by the unit ID they were assigned when created, so slaves with lower unit ids went before masters with higher, with spellcasting coming before physical action. You could thus have a communion with a master at the bottom of the action order casting buffs for a bunch of slaves higher up in the order, who could spam lower-level spells en masse after getting their paths juiced by power of the spheres or something. Or you could assign the masters to cast combat buffs then shoot a bow for a bunch of thugs who lacked the paths to self-buff but have astral (namely golems) or a slave matrix. However, this was kind of janky and got fixed at some point so slaves go inert until all masters leave the field of battle, so it's trickier than it was.
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May 10, 2024 00:11
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As Man's player, I want to point that there's a THIRD kind of communion that Man and a handful of other nations can access: Choruses. These require the Spellsinger trait (a tag that increases cast time while halving fatigue cost of spells) and Glamour magic, rather than Astral (for Communions) or Blood (for Sabbaths). Choruses behave normally, except that if a mage passes the 100 fatigue threshold and passes out they automatically drop out of the Chorus (can't sing if you're snoozing!). It's worth pointing out that communions and sabbath also impose a penalty to cast speed. So Choruses are slow but they don't rack up a lot of fatigue per cast even on what would otherwise be pretty big spells due to the half fatigue of spellsinging. Howl for example, a pretty big N spell that summons wolves from all around for as long as the caster lives, costs 300 fatigue. Normally that's enough to knock a mage out for a looooong time AND also incur some damage from going over 200 fatigue (I think it's one point per 15 or 20 fatigue). With the half fatigue cost that's only 150 fatigue. If you can cast it straight up you'll still be snoozing, but you won't half kill yourself in the process. The half fatigue cost lets Man and other Chorus nations run top-heavy if they want to without risk of killing their slaves. Instead they just risk the slaves passing out, lowering the value of the Chorus. It also lets you more safely use your cheaper mages as slaves, since as briefly mentioned before there's multipliers applied to fatigue gained by slaves based off their paths. I believe how it goes is if the paths are equal, no modifier. If the master has higher levels in the path for that spell, the slave takes twice the fatigue they normally would. No shared path (or a master is an Innate Spellcaster) incurs a whopping 8 times multiplier! And if the slave has a higher level they get the fatigue cut in half! So if I have a mage that's a master with 4 slaves and they cast a fire spell that incurs 50 fatigue, that would result in 10 fatigue to everyone if they're all the same level in fire magic. If the master has a native level of 3 and the slaves are all Fire 2, then the slaves would take 20 fatigue while the master takes 10. If a slave doesn't have ANY fire magic they take 80 fatigue. And if a slave has 4 fire to the master's 3 then that slave only takes 5 fatigue. Temporary boosts from certain spells (like the aforementioned Summon Earthpower, which grants +1 Earth for the battle and recovers an extra 4 fatigue per round) are counted for this calculation. So if you're casting Earth spells with several masters and slaves that are all equal level in Earth and one of the masters casts Summon Earthpower, suddenly your slaves are taking half their share of fatigue from every master except the one who cast Summon Earthpower. One strong perk to Astral Communions is that Astral has a spell, Power of the Spheres, that takes an S (aStral) gem to boost EVERY path the mage knows by 1 for that battle. This allows the slaves to take reduced fatigue from basically every spell cast, assuming the mages in the communion all have the same levels in every path of magic (which is rare but not impossible, depending on the nation). I apologize for the huge tangent about communions and Choruses, I've been playing a lot of nations that can make use of them lately. IthilionTheBrave fucked around with this message at 02:01 on May 10, 2024 |
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May 10, 2024 01:57
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Voluntary choruses are literally just MA Man, as they're the only nation that actually get the spells. LA Man loses them. Precisely three other nations (both Marignons and MA Pythium) can access some angel summons that naturally have Chorus Master and Chorus Slave (which means they automatically have the relevant effect at the start of battle), but they don't actually have the spells. There are also no items that give an equipped commander Master/Slave for Choruses like there are for Communions or Sabbaths, so that's literally everything that exists for them in unmodded Dominions.
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May 10, 2024 02:22
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Numbus26 posted:Sometimes I wonder if there are any 'good guys' in Dominions. I mean obviously everybody's warring to be Top God, but everything I see is all "sacrificing virgins for demon power" and "summoning ten thousand skeletons For The Trees". Is there a single nation besides Man(which I've gathered is The Boring One) where people aren't just assholes? Everyone stereotypes Ermor and Sceleria as evil because they keep turning people into Skeletons. But once people are skeletons, they seem generally pretty OK with Ermor and Sceleria, so clearly the Skeleton nations are the closest thing to "Good" in the Dominions Universe.
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May 10, 2024 02:35
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Honestly Sceleria is pretty mellow as far as nations go, they are rather like MA/LA Agartha, different and a bit mournful. Same with Pythium all told.
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May 10, 2024 04:27
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I don't understand much about how communions and similar work in game terms. But I love the different variants (Chorus, Sabbath, Communion) from a roleplaying perspective.
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May 10, 2024 05:57
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Machaka speaking, This point in the game was about when I was putting together my 1) Asphodel is whats called a domkill and freespawn nation, i.e. a nation that automatically kills province population and creates troops within their dominion. Other nations that have these qualities are LA Lemuria, MA Ermor and LA R'yleh, though I might be forgetting a couple. Asphodel falls on the gentler side of this and with the high growth scales isn't very noticeable, unlike lemuria and ermor who are will make everything they touch useless and are a giant pain to fight. The troops asphodel make aren't devastating but if they sit unopposed for a while they can still drop staggering numbers of plant zombies on you. 2) Based on the above its a pretty easy sell to convince other people to attack alongside you, Man and Pyrene didn't want to end up facing a potentially juggernaut asphodel any more than I did. We all had good access to their territory and stood to gain about the same amount of land if we all worked together. 3) Earlier in the game I'd bumped with an expansion party of theirs and realized my bless that is based around a fire shield effect (Missed attacks against the blessed units suffer moderately strong fire damage) was tailor made to fight them, all of their freespawn units do very little damage but have a number of sleep vine attacks that inflict fatigue, they basically instantly murdered themselves on my blessed spiders. 4) They weren't really talking to anyone. This isn't always a problem, but silence is ominous and easy to misunderstand. In my case I'd been watching troops gather near my border, but it was also near pyrene. I couldn't really know if they'd attack either of us, but given all the points above proactively dealing with them was the best option.
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May 10, 2024 06:55
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Carcer posted:Machaka speaking, Ea Therodos is another pain in the rear end popkill freespawn nation that also happens to be underwater. They're like LA R'yleh if they had pretenders who just autocast foul vapors, so you know, FUN! Also Yomi is the the worst possible freespawn nation but it is so much fun, TGG fucked around with this message at 07:40 on May 10, 2024 |
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May 10, 2024 07:32
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TGG posted:
And it is pop kill in that people will just pop in and kill you because it is not a good nation
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May 13, 2024 06:09
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