|
Do not underestimate chaos power in Dominions 6.
|
#
?
May 13, 2024 08:12
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 6, 2024 01:13 |
|
|
Yomi can be rough to get off the ground and is dependent on having the right terrain (highlands and mountains) to get there, but shikome with a good bless can be real blenders and even the lowly ko-oni can be a menace with +5 strength and attack.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2024 10:36
|
|
|
I felt like their freespawn was really cranked down in 6 compared to 5, last I tried them. Even templing the hell out of everything it felt like I still only got a pitiful dribble of demons.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2024 12:31
|
|
|
Credit where credit is due, Shikome are complete beasts and are up there with some of the stronger sacreds out there, and the Dai Oni are insane but drat I just want them to be something more.
|
|
#
?
May 13, 2024 20:43
|
|
|
What turn is the game on right now?
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2024 17:18
|
|
|
We just rolled over to turn 58 after taking about a week break for real life. There's been many a shenanigan, as is to be expected in this phase of a game.
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2024 17:26
|
|
|
Yep, I’ll be picking things up here again shortly - life’s been pretty hectic but it’s calming back down at least a little bit
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2024 18:06
|
|
|
Turn 22 The big action of this turn is our invasion of T'ien Ch'i - we see the 5 battles that we expected, which is always nice - surprise fights you weren't expecting really aren't what you want on a turn like this. First up though, we see TC claiming a throne of their own! This is good intel for us, since it tells us where TC's god currently is - the message tells us this is the actual god and not just a prophet making the claim. The actual throne is fairly nice - free PD is a good bonus and *normally* +1 order would be great... but, we already have 3 order. That would put us into the "lose RP" category if claimed, which we really don't want right now. So, if we do manage to win this war and gain ownership over the throne, we'll likely leave it unclaimed until we're either close to winning or until we're basically 100% done with research. We also finish some research into Alteration - Alt 3 doesn't do a ton for us, but does give us Mist which can be nice when fighting lots of ranged units and evocation mages. TC has both, so this is a nice option to have until we get better anti-ranged magic with higher research levels. And then finally on the events phase of the turn, we discover a mine! This is kinda nice - iron mines give bonus resources to a province and we have adjacent forts, so this can help produce some more troops. Not a huge deal, but a nice bonus. The battles themselves are fairly uninteresting tactically - all the raiders just go up against province defence, which they take out with minimal losses. TC's PD is fairly unimpressive, like most nations. We have human with pointy stick: and human with composite bow: The composite bow and relatively high damage on the pike do make these guys somewhat better than our own human troops, but they can't do much to threaten the colossi troops. So - with the coastline invaded, we need to decide how to follow up. Looking at the strategic map, we're going to try and take down the palisade at the south end of TC's range (red circle) since it's fairly isolated and also only a single turn of sailing from our capital. We know that TC's god is currently at the throne (white circle), which looks to be fairly out of the way. We'll go ahead and push inland with one of our squads and see how they react, leaving another sitting where it is to search and catch out any small forces trying to reclaim land. Then finally, we're also sailing in one of the colossi queens and a weaver to provide some better magical support, like with the Mist spell we just unlocked. In general, our nation is starting to shape up nicely. The overview shows us that our forts are really starting to stack up - while Phlegra, Wood of Many Paths, and Bayville aren't actually owned by us since we're sieging forts, we still have 7 forted provinces with a mix of palisades and fortresses. Our site searching has also started to pay off a bit and we have income in everything except astral pearls at this point. If we can get a strong foothold and snag some of TC's forts quickly, we'll be in a pretty strong position for this point in the game.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2024 08:18
|
|
|
Do we (as in, you) have enough information to make an educated guess as to what sort of pretender god Tien Chi possesses? A researcher or weak God that traded strength for scales would have TC keep them out of the way (I believe), but a fighter sort of god? Even if they aren't immediately here, they are not too far away, and if TC manages to bring them and troops over fast, this could get hairy and more drawn out than we'd like.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2024 14:47
|
|
|
Mindopali posted:Do we (as in, you) have enough information to make an educated guess as to what sort of pretender god Tien Chi possesses? A researcher or weak God that traded strength for scales would have TC keep them out of the way (I believe), but a fighter sort of god? Even if they aren't immediately here, they are not too far away, and if TC manages to bring them and troops over fast, this could get hairy and more drawn out than we'd like. Yea, we actually saw it earlier in the game in a scouted battle vs some indies: So, it has very high earth and astral paths and the white tiger is a pretty competent combat chassis. It can self-buff up to similar prot levels as Phlegra's god, and it's also naturally ethereal due to the bless. However, it doesn't regen naturally which makes it much less tankier if we can get enough troops surrounding it - preferably orichalcum guard since they have magic weapons and ignore ethereal. We can expect that it's likely to try and throw out some gifts from heaven to soften up opposition, though a single gifts caster is rarely all that scary due to how inaccurate the spell is.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2024 15:17
|
|
|
Ethereal is the sort of bless that's scary on some nations early in the game, but generally means they're extremely fragile from midgame onwards since they're almost guaranteed to have completely tanked their scales for it. It's usually so overpriced it's not worth it unless you have freespawn sacreds, everywhere-recruitable sacreds(i.e. not just in your capital province) or a lot of summonable sacreds. Because often the strong late-game blesses are the ones that affect your sacred mages more than the ones that apply to your sacred troops which will often be reduced to an elite minority on the battlefield by comparison. That 8S could be spent on Far Caster or Arcane Finesse instead. I'm sure that if you look at TC's provinces they'll have some truly rancid scales, like maybe Misfortune 3 or something.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2024 15:34
|
|
|
Ethereal as a bless is incredibly redundant on a nation that shits out an enormous amount of cheap E/S mages as a matter of standard practice.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2024 15:43
|
|
|
My bad, had forgotten we already saw the pretender god. So, they got a combat chassis that isn't exactly a tank, TC will want him in fights he's sure to win. Unless desperate. We're shutting down what TC is naturally good at, I wonder if they'll bring up unexpected countermeasures in terms of weird spells or mercenaries or something.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2024 15:49
|
|
|
Ethereal is also massively devalued lategame as mages become more prominent and important. And is also massively devalued in this case due to Phaecia's sacreds having magic weapons by default. Completely negates any benefit from the bless!
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2024 15:54
|
|
|
IthilionTheBrave posted:Ethereal is also massively devalued lategame as mages become more prominent and important. And is also massively devalued in this case due to Phaecia's sacreds having magic weapons by default. Completely negates any benefit from the bless! Common video game logic would tell me this is a good combo with a nation that has an aggressive early expansion tendency. But that sounds like something necessary for everyone to do anyway in this game. Are there nations that are equivalent to Zerg like nations in this game? Mindopali fucked around with this message at 16:38 on May 18, 2024 |
|
#
?
May 18, 2024 16:04
|
|
|
Some nations have particularly powerful troops who can expand early game without help, and most nations have sacreds who can be buffed up to be good expanders if you commit to an incarnate bless on an awake guy. MA Ulm is probably the most gotta win early nation as far as I understand; they have powerful heavy infantry with low mr and relatively weak mages. They do have a bonus to item forging that lets them cheaply gear out their recruitable heavy cav commanders as half-decent thugs and some unique "gently caress magic dudes in particular" spells, but they're utterly dependent on their Pretender to get the big spells out. There's also some nations, giant nations in particular, who just have really good troops who are hard to beat without magic and thus can make a bid at knocking a player out of the game before research really takes off. Take this with a grain of salt; I have little personal experience with MP.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2024 17:01
|
|
|
There are rush nations for sure. Mictlan, Vanheim, or Abyssia are all classic choices for "kill a neighbor before turn 20 and then try to research powerful endgame blood magic"
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2024 17:04
|
|
|
LA Andramania is another strong expanding nation. They're size 4 (humans are size 3) dog people with troops that mostly have formation fighter, which lets them fit more units in a square and thus negates that particular drawback to being bigger. In addition to being stronger and tougher than humans they also all have bite attacks in addition to their weapons, so they can really push out some damage. The best of their infantry also bring halberds, which are pretty solid weaoons when you get past the attack skill penalty (length of a spear, damage on par with a greataxe). They're also classed as animals, which opens up some fun buff options with Nature magic (which they, of course, have good access to).
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2024 17:16
|
|
|
namehereguy posted:MA Ulm is probably the most gotta win early nation as far as I understand; Not really. They're very midgame oriented, with the advantage of also having a very strong opening. quote:they have powerful heavy infantry with low mr and relatively weak mages. 9 is only 1 point less than a standard human, and your scales are drain so your guys are effectively 10 when you're on the defense. Having E2F1 as your default mage path is quite strong. They master smiths are very powerful battlemages, just somewhat narrow in their application. People often make the mistake of treating Ulm's troops as some kind of elite, and not bringing enough of them. They're 10 gold. They're not elite. And not being elite is good. You might have trouble massing them early due to their resource cost, but come midgame, you're as gold limited as everyone else is. Ulmish infantry are some of the most cost effective skirmishers and raiders in the game. What they lack in mapmove, they compensate by virtue of 10-20 of them + a master smith being a fully viable combat force that the enemy has to dedicate a lot more resources to stop, and affordable enough to be literally everywhere with groups like this. quote:They do have a bonus to item forging that lets them cheaply gear out their recruitable heavy cav commanders as half-decent thugs and some unique "gently caress magic dudes in particular" spells, but they're utterly dependent on their Pretender to get the big spells out. Thugging Black Lords is generally a trap outside of some counter-thugging options. The real power of the item discount is in the utility stuff and the potential to research rush. Iron blizzard is less "gently caress magic dudes in particular" (although it does hit harder against them) and more "I cast grapeshot" They are dependent on their pretender to provide defensive cover against certain spells early on and forge key boosters for indie mages. Some nations conquer land for gold, some for magic gems, others for strategic positioning. MA Ulm conquers to have somewhere to place a "we're hiring" sign. Few nations incorporate acquired indie mages into their roster as well as MA Ulm does. my dad fucked around with this message at 17:22 on May 18, 2024 |
|
#
?
May 18, 2024 17:19
|
|
|
MA Ulm might be weaker than other nations are in their lategames, but they can almost guarantee that they'll be the ones reaching lategame first. And it turns out things like "efficient at getting the most out of something" don't matter if someone inefficiently bludgeons you over the head with it first.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2024 17:30
|
|
|
MA Ulm shows that a great many problems can be solved by That's A Whole Lot of Pikes and Crossbows, Wow He Has 5 of Those Stacks. Problems which cannot be solved by that method can often be solved by Iron Blizzard.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2024 17:52
|
|
|
It also helps when pretty much every single one of your mages is also an armor piercing shotgun.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2024 18:00
|
|
|
And also capable of buffing your troops' already prodigious protection even higher. Earth magic is great for buffing troops in general, actually. Can buff strength, protection (by either enhancing armor or iron/stoneskin), give armor piercing to slashing/piercing weapons, and stun infliction to blunt/slashing. And they have Earth Meld/Maws of the Earth, earth elementals... MA Ulm also has a spell that tries to buff the MR of every friendly troops, but it's quirky in that the unit has to fail an easy MR check to get the buff. And in addition to being able to make an item that creates a temp fire gem for only a single actual fire gem, once you get some air gem income and a master Smith with random Air magic they can churn out owl quills for +6 research a turn for a single air gem (once you gave Dwarven hammers of course). This is how MA Ulm can get ahead on research quickly. There's also a Fire based research boosting item they can churn out easily (Lightless Lanterns, but it's higher level). How this works is Ulmish smiths get a -2 gem discount on all forging, and a Dwarven Hammer (construction 5, 3E and 15 Earth Gems to forge) gives another -2 that stacks, for a -4 discount to all forging.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2024 18:28
|
|
|
Mindopali posted:Are there nations that are equivalent to Zerg like nations in this game? Freespawn nations like MA Ermor, Lemuria and Asphodel are probably the closest you get, they can carry a good chunk of the game on "make a big cube of dudes, tell them to attack things" but by about the middle of the second year they're going to want to supplement with some battle magic or they'll get face rolled by whatever astral nation first researches Solar Rays or anyone with Fire or Earth access. MA Ermor and Asphodel also have some pretty elite sacreds that that you need to think about a bit in terms of supplementing them with blesses or where and when to spend them, while LA Lemuria mostly just drowns things in hard-to-differentiate ghosts until Jomon deletes them with astral magic.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2024 18:29
|
|
|
The other fun thing about Ulm is that people relying on their sacreds generally don't want to mess with them, even with a significant bless. Because Ulm has pseudo sacreds of their own (not actually sacred, but they are cap-only), whose entire purpose is to gently caress over other sacreds. Specifically they've got 27 damage magical halberds that have an added AoE fatigue effect on swing (not on hit) against anything sacred, which burns through practically any defense sacreds might have. And with 23 prot (and on a nation that has easy access to multiple ways of boosting that higher) they're a giant pain to kill too. Plus as they're not sacred you're not limited in production of them other than your cap's recruitment point limit, so if needed Ulm can turn out far more of them then any nation's sacreds other than recruit anywhere ones. The commander version even has Halt Heretic - an Awe variant that specifically works against sacreds - in case everything else about them hadn't clued you into them being an anti-sacred unit. edit: To be clear, high damage magical weapons help brute force through a LOT of protections in this game, so it's generally good to max Guardian production when you can even if sacreds aren't a concern. They're just designed to be extra good at solving that specific problem. Lord Koth fucked around with this message at 22:10 on May 18, 2024 |
|
#
?
May 18, 2024 22:03
|
|
|
DarthRoblox posted:
I'm actually kind of surprised how these went so well. Even though I know that big guys are mostlyy good at fighting little guys the like ~2 casualty count is so low, I don't get how more didn't get brained and die to a random arrow(s) or whatever.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2024 22:39
|
|
|
Lord Koth posted:The other fun thing about Ulm is that people relying on their sacreds generally don't want to mess with them, even with a significant bless. Because Ulm has pseudo sacreds of their own (not actually sacred, but they are cap-only), whose entire purpose is to gently caress over other sacreds. Specifically they've got 27 damage magical halberds that have an added AoE fatigue effect on swing (not on hit) against anything sacred, which burns through practically any defense sacreds might have. And with 23 prot (and on a nation that has easy access to multiple ways of boosting that higher) they're a giant pain to kill too. Plus as they're not sacred you're not limited in production of them other than your cap's recruitment point limit, so if needed Ulm can turn out far more of them then any nation's sacreds other than recruit anywhere ones. Oh yeah, Guardians are shitwreckers. Their magical halberds don't even have the attack penalty most halberds have! I've seen a squad of about 20 Guardians wreck 100+ indies without a single loss before. Your cap should he churning out Guardians ASAP, your other forts can furnish the other troop types. Also worth noting is that the fatigue effect from their halberds also affects pretenders themselves. Usually not relevant, but there's always an edge case where an expanding pretender might run into some Guardians and get a rude surprise.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2024 22:56
|
|
|
JonBolds posted:I'm actually kind of surprised how these went so well. Even though I know that big guys are mostlyy good at fighting little guys the like ~2 casualty count is so low, I don't get how more didn't get brained and die to a random arrow(s) or whatever. Sure, let's take a closer look at why these fights are so lopsided despite being at a numeric disadvantage: Here's how I generally have these squads arrayed - guard in the front in a line, light colossi backing them a few squares behind and a few heavies protecting the commanders. Meanwhile, PD tends to wind up arranged kinda randomly - they're mostly blobs of troops scattered around, and the archers are actually in front. The archers get what looks like a good volley in early... But only a single arrows manages to hit, for 6 damage (guard have 24 HP). Now, some of the arrows outright miss but the bigger factor is shields. To understand why shields make such a difference, we have to dig into the game math a bit: That's the formula from the manual about how the game determines whether an arrow actually hits the target or not. DRN here means "dominions random number" (not to be confused with drn, which is a different version of dominions random number), but it means an exploding 2d6. The colossi are size 4 and generally stack up to 2 in a square, so the attacker calculation is 2d6 + 4. On the defender side, we have the same DRN but then also take shields into account. The guard have a parry 5 shield while the light and heavy colossi have a parry 4 shield. Those turn into bonuses of +10 and +8, respectively. With the way dominions odds work, each arrow has an ~16% chance of hitting on a colossi and ~8% chance of hitting a guard. And then finally, even if the arrow does hit the archers only do 13 damage which is roughly equal to the guard's protection, making actual damage even less likely. The light colossi are only wearing linen so they're more likely to be hurt, but it still takes a lot of arrows on average to down a colossi. Fast forwarding a little, we can also see that my lines are a lot more cohesive than the enemy's - they're trickling in in 2's and 3's while my lines are still fairly tight. This is mostly because that big block of archers was right in the middle and the infantry had to split up to go around them and get to us. ' The footmen have pretty low attack and the guard especially have good defense while the reverse is true for the guard's attack vs the footmen's defense. The only hope for the footmen is to be able to swarm our relatively lesser numbers and rely on more dice rolls and harassment penalties (if a unit is attacked multiple times in a round, it takes mounting penalties to it's defense score). In a mostly even fight like this, the footmen die pretty much instantly while inflicting no damage of their own. And then finally, the light colossi javelins are way more effective than the arrows. They're thrown from close range so they're quite accurate, the pike footmen don't have a shield, and the 17 damage on the javelin far exceeds the 9 protection on the footmen. Add in some lightning from the storm captains, and the footmen are in for a bad time. The shielded ones would far a bit better in terms of survivability, but since the AI placed them in the rear of the formation they barely even get into combat before the defenders rout. If you really want to get into the weeds, it's possible to look at the individual actions for each unit in a battle. It tends to only show you the end result of roll + bonus, but it's easy to see that the guard was attacked 7 times but they were all either misses or absorbed fully by armor - meanwhile, the guard hit 2 out of 3 times. Each hit was also basically lethal - the second hit did enough damage but it instead cut off the arm of the second target (this is not immediately lethal, and yes it is tracked individually because this game is insane). DarthRoblox fucked around with this message at 23:43 on May 18, 2024 |
|
#
?
May 18, 2024 23:38
|
|
|
Thanks for the in-depth answer on my question about zergs. And I gather from this that Ulm has quite a good reputation too.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2024 09:17
|
|
|
Mindopali posted:Thanks for the in-depth answer on my question about zergs. They have a reputation for being newbie friendly since their available options are fairly limited, but also fairly strong. They can have a harder time later in the game once big battlefield magic and powerful summoned troops start showing up, since it becomes pretty easy to negate most of what Ulm can do and start to pick on things like their subpar magic resistance. They feel like a fairly snowball-y nation to me - as long as you can keep good momentum and your enemies on the back foot you're pretty strong, but if you start to stalemate or get pushed back it can be tough to regain the initiative.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2024 19:20
|
|
|
Turn 23 A decent amount going on this turn - the most interesting is that it looks like hostilities might've kicked off between Pyrène and Asphodel! First up though, we have this fun pair of events. "Something awful has happened and the population has left" is a fairly common negative event, but those people don't just vanish. Phlegra is next to Kunal, so about half those people just scooted over one province. That's actually kinda nice, capitals have high populations so it can be hard to get them to grow. Once we finally take Phlegra's fort this will be a nice income boost. We also get around to claiming the crystal throne - we have a fort going up here in a few turns since the crystal mages the throne unlocks are quite nice for us. We finished a brief dip into conjuration magic this turn, mostly for access to these guys. Yetis are a fairly efficient water summon that requires A/W crosspaths which we have in abundance right now. They're squishy, but have a cold aura that can be quite effective at shutting nearby troops down and TC has a cold dominion which makes the cold aura more effective. They're a good bulky line troop for us, and with easy mistform access they'll also be quite tanky. The two worldwide events are a little funny - the unrest mostly cancels out, leaving the world more orderly but also a bit more magical and unruly for a turn or two. I think the moon event might be part of a chain? I don't entirely recall however. The Pyrène/Asphodel fight is just Pyrène attacking into minimal PD, which goes about how you'd expect. We do however get a peek at Pyrène's bless during the fight: Hmm, that's fairly nasty for us. The shock resistance makes our Air magic a lot less effective, and blood surge basically gives them a temporary stat buff when they kill anything. The strength and defense are generically good, making them harder to kill while also hitting harder. We'll want to avoid any conflict for now; we'd have a hard time dealing with this at the moment. However, looking at where this fight took place that shouldn't be an issue. That province was a throne - attacking another player's throne is about as big of a declaration of war as you can make so I'd imagine Pyrène is going to be busy for the forseeable future. We'll take a closer look at Asphodel once we see a fight that's a little more substantial than just PD. Our fight on the other hand is about the same as last turn, clearing out PD with no losses. The final battle event for the turn is Pyrène being attacked by a bunch of wolves. Indie attacks are another random event that can pop up sometimes, and they can range from "has trouble with a single point of PD" to "can kill entire armies" in terms of threat level. The wolf attack is on the weak end of the scale, but Pyrène also has almost nothing here so this might be close. The battle opens with a single emerald knight facing down the entire pack. This... actually isn't an issue for the knight, it's so superior that the wolves can barely even scratch it. However, there's a lot of wolves and some of them start to filter through. The wolf tribe warriors intercept some of them, but a half dozen or so are headed for the backlines. Once through, the wolves quickly chow down on the bishop and are threatening the PD commander - if they manage to kill him, then Pyrène will rout off the field. It's not be though - the castellan is well armored and can face down some wolves. It's fairly close though, the PD was routing so this was nearly a loss. It wouldn't be consequential in the grand scheme of things, but it would be pretty funny to lose to wolves. Back to the strategic side of things - we can see that TC's god moved to their capital (white circle). The terrain is fairly constricted around TC itself, so it should take a bit for it to make it to the coast forts if that's where it's headed. It might attack the coastal province next to TC, but that's fine - we can't really defend it right now. Instead, we're focusing on the two forts to the north and south (orange and red circles). The fort in the orange circle is critically damaged, so we're leaving a small force there while bringing the other two captains to the fort in the blue circle. It's currently under siege by only a single scout, so I'm hoping TC will move up some of their infantry to clear the siege and we can catch them in a bit of a trap. Finally, we're also getting a bit unlucky with our capital mages. The 4 mages in the middle of the list are our prince consorts - we're recruiting them for now since each one has a 27.5% chance at getting an A4 path, which is what we need to further boost air magic. We've recruited 4 so far with no luck - we would've expected to get at least one A4 2/3 of them time by now. Still, they're good mages in general so this isn't a huge problem, but it's definitely something I hope happens sooner rather than later.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2024 20:10
|
|
|
What did "Awareness" mean as part of Pyrene's bless?
|
|
#
?
May 20, 2024 06:35
|
|
|
Awareness is basically a counter to the harassment penalties I've talked about. Normally, a single unit taking multiple enemy attacks in a single round will start to have a stacking penalty to their defense, eventually bringing it down to zero if they get really swarmed. Awareness counteracts that, to a degree. I'm not sure exactly what the formula is, but units with awareness can tank several additional attacks per round without penalty. It's a good pair with the defense part of the bless, since defense-focused units tend to rely on not being hit rather than being tough. The emerald knights are a case where they have both high defense and high protection, making them pretty formidable even without the bless.
|
|
#
?
May 20, 2024 07:10
|
|
|
Was it EA Eremor that has the sacreds that are suited for rushing, since they're kind of resource cheap?
|
|
#
?
May 20, 2024 07:46
|
|
|
DarthRoblox posted:Awareness is basically a counter to the harassment penalties I've talked about. Normally, a single unit taking multiple enemy attacks in a single round will start to have a stacking penalty to their defense, eventually bringing it down to zero if they get really swarmed. Ironically, this one is incredibly simple and doesn't even involve DRN. Assuming it's not lying (very unlikely, but I've been informed that there's at least one bless description which does), the description for Awareness says it adds Unsurroundable (+2) to the unit. Unsurroundable is an ability which allows a unit to ignore the first (x) attacks each round for the purpose of starting to pick up harassment penalties, and given both the rider and mount pick up the ability, and attacks will end up split between the two... yeah, it'll take a fair few attacks before you start dropping their defense.
|
|
#
?
May 20, 2024 08:39
|
|
|
Breadmaster posted:Was it EA Eremor that has the sacreds that are suited for rushing, since they're kind of resource cheap? You may be thinking of MA Sceleria? They're one of Ermor's successor states, and they have resource-cheap sacreds with Ethereal for free but just a shield for physical armor. EA Ermor has some nice heavy-for-the-age cavalry but they're pretty resource-intensive.
|
|
#
?
May 20, 2024 22:54
|
|
|
Right, right, I may have been thinking of a previous LP with Eremor that was for Dominions 3.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2024 01:28
|
|
|
Breadmaster posted:Right, right, I may have been thinking of a previous LP with Eremor that was for Dominions 3. Ah, that would have been MA Ermor at the time; they got renamed to Sceleria and what was then LA Ermor became MA Ermor and Lemuria became a full nation instead of being a weird global-based sidegrade for (then) LA Ermor
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2024 02:51
|
|
|
Turn 24 Another pretty busy turn - we catch a fair few fights, including one at Bayville where we set a bit of a trap last turn. The random events aren't particularly interesting this turn - a bad storm, some bandits, the usual. The magic site we find gives us +1 pearl a turn, pretty nice - the little sites definitely add up over time. For the first fight, we catch Man attacking into an Asphodelian province. This is a pretty hearty stack from Man - lots of their sacred cavalry. It also tells us that at least Pyrène and Man are fighting Asphodel - the curse of being a popkill and freespawn nation is it's usually not difficult for your enemies to make common cause to kill you off before you get too established. This also gives us a look at their bless. Blood surge we've seen before, but the others are new. Blur effectively gives your blessed troops +2 defense (really it's -2 attack to attackers) unless they have True Sight or Spirit Sight, which are relatively uncommon on normal troops. It's definitely not bad, though can be countered with magic later on. Heroism, on the other hand, gives your troops an experience boost. I haven't talked about experience yet, but basically as troops engage in combat or just slowly over time, they gain experience points. At certain thresholds, they gain a star which gives a variety of stat boosts. Typically most units will reach 1-2 stars fairly quickly and then slow way down - heroism can significantly accelerate XP gain and makes 3-5 stars much more feasible. It's pretty good if you expect your sacreds to survive a lot of fights, and tough cavalry fit that bill. Far Caster on the other hand is a purely mage-centric buff. All spells have a range, so this adds a flat 50% to the base range for any combat spell. This can be very very good - a lot of the strong AOE spells also have a fairly short range, so being able to have your mages stand further from the front lines is quite good. On the other side of the field, we see some of Asphodel's actual troops. There's not a ton here, but let's take a quick look: Asphodel is a bit different from most nations, because the majority of their troops aren't recruited. Instead, their priests can reanimate as an action for their turn, and undead will also slowly freespawn in provinces with Asphodel's dominion. Manikins are the most basic kind of freespawn, and are generally just there to get in the way. They have pretty awful stats and are unlikely to hit much of anything, but they do bog things down. Asphodel also gets some national spells to buff their undead a bit, which can make them slightly more of a threat. On the other end of the spectrum, there's the Sagittarian Carcasses. These are Asphodel's freespawn sacreds and are actually quite strong. They can be a bit hard to mass because of their freespawn nature, but each one is worth quite a few manikins. The fight itself is a stomp - the knights are barely even slowed down by the undead and Man also has some priests along to throw out banishes (the white pillars of light), which only target undead in an AOE - very effective against Asphodel. It'll be very interesting to see how the fight goes when Asphodel has more of a proper army in place to fight. We also see our troops put the north fort under siege - it's another PD stomp, but we can really see the sleep clouds having a good effect here. A solid third of TC's troops are taking a snooze, breaking up their formations nicely. Moving on to the right in Bayville, here's what's on our side. We have one group of light colossi off to the side to try and get into the enemy backlines, while the rest are in our usual guard in front, lights behind, captains in the rear formation. On TC's side... oh dear. I, uh, didn't think that the PG would be able to get here this turn - our trap has all of a sudden started to look like not such a good idea. If it was just the red guard cavalry I think we might still win here, but with the PG this is looking quite bad for us. TC opens by putting their mages into a communion, while the PG immediately starts casting gifts from heaven. Interestingly, the other mages don't actually join in on the gifts and instead cast random buffs - odd. The first gifts come down and... completely miss. This is the downside of the spell - it's incredibly inaccurate and will often miss even fairly large formations of troops. A second cast goes out and does a bit of splash damage to both our troops as well as the red guard. This is really risky on TC's part - one of the meteors could wipe out a lot of red guard with just a bit of bad luck. As the lines close, the captains are able to lightning bolt down a few of the red guard, but our lines look quite thin compared to the mass of cav. Meanwhile, a more accurate cast comes down and nearly wipes out our light colossi squad in a single blow, immediately routing the survivors. One final cast comes down and manages to land two meteors squarely on our guard... and also a meteor on the red guard, killing troops on both sides. While it's an effective spell, collateral damage definitely comes with the territory when casting gifts. Our troops are holding out fairly well, but after running through it's script the tiger runs over to join the melee - with our troops depleted and already fully engaged by the red guard, it's able to flank us and quickly kill off everything it runs into. After that it's not long until we're fully routed, with many of the survivors being picked off before they reach the edge of the field. Overall, this is definitely a loss for us. We manage to take down roughly equal numbers of TC's sacreds at least, but losing a captain and almost 30 light colossi hurts. This isn't a complete disaster but it does diminish our local forces by quite a bit. We can also see that even if troops manage to flee the battlefield, it's still not a guarantee of their safety. If a troop's commander is still alive then they tend to make it to safety, but troops who's commander was killed have a much lower shot at retreating successfully. So - with the loss at Bayville, we're going to abandon the middle of the coast for now and focus forces on the north and south forts from the last update: In the south, the fort walls have been breached so we're attacking with actually a pretty small force - only the second captain is actually sitting on the province, and units can't move and storm a fort on the same turn. Palisades have pretty weak defenders, so I'm taking a gamble here that what we have here will be enough to take the fort. The reinforcements are mostly because of the large stack of barbarians to the west - I'm expecting they'll try to relive the siege, so the additional forces should be enough to repel them. In the north, we're moving in more forces to start working on the walls here. TC has some decent sized stacks around here so I'm not sure we'll have enough time to get through the walls, but we want to keep applying pressure in different areas. In the final fight of the turn, TC experiences some quite poor luck. They appear to have Misfortune 2 in their dominion, which opens up some rather nasty indie attack events. While the wolf attack we saw last turn can be defeated by minimal PD, a Knight invasion is a while different matter and can defeat even fairly strong armies - let alone PD. Despite TC's fairly sizable PD here, they're brushed aside with no losses. Looking at the map, this is really unfortunate for TC. This is one of their actual upgraded castles and it's also at the edge of their territory. It's going to be difficult for them to get a sufficient relief force down here to get rid of the knights, and they'll stick around until defeated. A stroke of bad luck for them, but very good luck for us.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2024 20:23
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 6, 2024 01:13 |
|
|
Man Player: Of note for my bless is that all my mages but one (troubadors) are sacred, so I'm theoretically getting good mileage out of it. I think if I were to redesign my pretender I'd consider going Arcane Finesse for +1 spell penetration instead. Man has good Glamour access and Glamour relies a fair bit on MR checks, which that +1 Pen would help with. Either way, with strong sacred cav and mostly sacred mages I felt a mixed bless like this was a decent idea rather than going all in on my troops or mages.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2024 20:33
|
|