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Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

amuayse posted:

Hmm. Maybe nerfing all the mages by 1 path? So it's A1, D1, and W1 with a 50% chance of +1? And sending the Priest and Priestess random paths down to 30%? Sailing will DEFINETLY be nerfed, and there will be a lot more nerfs when Kristoffer finally brings out coastal recruit like he said. I'll get rid of Menehune's forge bonus and replace it with a resource bonus when that mod command comes out.
Oh, and I'm adding Mo'o as a mountain recruit. I don't know if I should make them sentient or non-sentient.

Why not just get rid of B and S entirely? Is there really a reason that the nation needs those paths? That would also give you an excuse to up the paths or add a little diversity to some of the other mages, since they won't be able to naturally form communions (assuming that's still a thing in dom4). The Ilahi lord seems like it has a bit too much of a mishmash of abilities. Consider removing the assassin ability. Also, why do the mages need disease/affliction healing? There's a very good reason why healing is incredibly rare in Dom3.

If you really want blood on the nation, you might also consider adding in blood hunters as a national summon instead of as recruitable mages. That way their blood income is throttled by their gem income.

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Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

amuayse posted:

S exists as a rather small random, so I think it's alright as long as I tweak Priest of the Four's random paths. I'm not sure what do about Blood though. Human sacrifice was a thing in Hawaii, but it wasn't a very big thing. Maybe I could just make the blood mage a B1H1 instead? I'll throw out the assassin tag for Ilahi lord, since the Retribution of the Kapu exists as an Assassin spell.

I really appreciate the feedback though. :)

On the one hand, the S is a small random, on the other hand, having S opens up communions. It also opens up a whole host of incredibly useful utility items. It's a very powerful path, and not having national access to it means that players are more likely to purchase it on their god, which is good from a balance perspective (this is doubly true if the nation benefits from a bless, as an S bless isn't as strong as some other alternatives).

If you add in blood, people will use blood. That means that people playing your nation are going to be doing tons of human sacrificing, rather than just a small amount. Making blood mages sacred and spammable makes the problem even worse, since people will buy them everywhere. Making them healers just compounds the problem even further, since now they're useful even outside of blood hunting and combat.

The problem isn't that individual units are too strong, but rather that you've just got too much going on. Healers are powerful, sailing is powerful, access to lots of paths is powerful, blood is incredibly powerful, H3 priests are powerful, etc. Reign some things in. For a nation based on islanders, sailing fits thematically; I'd consider keeping that. Healers might feel thematic (everyone has doctors after all), but they're very strong and very rare for a reason; it's probably best to just axe that ability. Blood is the sort of thing entire nations are built around. Adding blood in just to add some flavor doesn't work well, because players will convert their entire economy to blood hunting if and when they can. If you really want to add in some blood flavor, gate it behind some expensive (gemwise, researchwise, or both) national summons to at least delay the inevitable. Does your nation really need access to every path in the game? Removing access to the strongest paths (B and S) gives you an excuse to make your mages more heavily focused on their remaining paths, which increases the number of cool things they can do.

Remember, almost every culture has really diverse myths that can be used to justify adding almost anything. Make sure you focus on what makes the nation you're making unique and balanced, rather than just adding in everything because it's mentioned in a random myth somewhere. Figure out a central theme and stick to it.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

Speleothing posted:

:siren:Reverse communions are no longer a thing. :siren:

Edited for bolding and alarms.

I'm not sure how I feel about this change. On the one hand, I know they're essentially unintended behavior (since they require fiddling with unit order, which is not something that should be required). On the other hand, they've been a thing for a long time and they're a lot of fun to set up and use. I'm not sure that they're a gamebreaking thing that needs to be removed, honestly. I feel like the game is tactically richer when small squads of otherwise crappy mages can link up and rain down some hell.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

Lilli posted:

Honestly, this is a big reason in why I'm not too broken up at their removal. I feel like a lot of the notable changes they've made are things that are unintuitive. They've removed things that newer play aren't going to learn outside of just straight up having someone tell them. (like reverse communions) I don't really have a problem with them simplifying the game in that manner. I'm okay with making the skill ceiling more obtainable if it means making the game more accessible.

The easy way to fix it is to just make them intentional - either add in a different version of communion master that doesn't restrict casting from slaves, or a different version of communion slave that doesn't have the master restrict them. Reverse communions are a hell of a lot of fun when you've got something like crappy 1S1E mages that link up and suddenly start spamming out blade wind thanks to inheriting power of the spheres and summon earthpower. The mages leading the communion can then potentially get enough power to pop a good endgame army buff in the process as well. The danger and balancing point comes from needing to manage fatigue so that they don't kill themselves.

It does make communions a lot weaker though, which might be their intent.

Edit: Speaking of managing spells, has the spellcasting AI been enhanced at all yet, or is there a way to restrict the general "cast spells" order to only cast certain types of spells (buff, damage, debuff, etc.)?

Dirk the Average fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Sep 13, 2013

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

WYA posted:

I think slow to recruit is awesome and adds depth to the game

I'd like to see them play with cooldowns on how often you can recruit certain things. Something like for Jomon, where their recruit anywhere 2S2? mages that are, for some inexplicable reason, slow to recruit. Instead of slow to recruit, it'd make more sense to restrict them to only being able to be recruited every other month, while still allowing the fort to be used for other things in the interim.

Why on earth did they make those mages slow to recruit? Jomon is even described as having weak mages; I'm surprised they made the list of things strong enough to warrant being slow to recruit.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

dis astranagant posted:

Blood 9 bless returns damage taken to whoever dealt it. Apparently this includes arrows and spells. You still take the damage, but the enemy battlemages and the like get hosed.

Huh, that actually gives Blood 9 bless a surprisingly useful utility in the mid late game. It takes a bit more fiddling to actually use it around your mages, but I think the ideal case is to not use sacreds around your mages, and instead use them as a suicide squad later on to kill enemy communions. Mix in small numbers of sacred with normal line troops and the feedback from enemy spells could be disastrous.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

Lord Windy posted:

I like the idea of LA Ermor where they get chaff for free and use gems to summon their mages. I don't like their 'kill everything' aura of death.

Is it possible to make a mod nation where they get free chaff? Or is that something that only an Ermor thing? I'm interested in trying my hand at modding a nation and that would be the kind of thing I'm interested in making.

You could also consider Pangaea - their mages summon maenads for free just by existing. Modifying commanders to either actively summon or passively summon is generally easier to balance and modify compared to Ermor's freespawn. The other problem is that Ermor's freespawn are balanced around the idea that Ermor has no real monetary income to speak of. This means that they don't hire mages, can't really afford units with upkeep, and have to pay death gems out the wazoo to get any decent research done.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

How are u posted:

Sorry for spreading false information about animals and sieges, I thought it was true :(

To be fair, what you were saying is backed up by the manual. I also thought it was true, and am very glad it was brought up so that I could learn otherwise.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

Flavahbeast posted:

Yeah all of the gods and nations are some shade of "evil" by modern standards, just compare the Fountain of Blood's description text to the description of the outwardly more benign Oracle. All of the nations are trying to enslave free peoples and exterminate other faiths, there's no diplomatic or science victory and the world's mortal population will almost always drop dramatically over the course of a game, its cool

You can technically enable a science victory. I'm not sure why you would, but it's possible.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

Korwin posted:

Wonder how much the numbers Change with an N9B9 bless...

Somehow I doubt they'd change too much. A9B9 might work a tad better; your mages are more accurate and less likely to snipe jaguars, your jaguars are highly resistant to arrows, and you get the benefits of blood vengeance.

Edit: vv I meant in general, not in this specific test. My point is that A9 gives a very tangible benefit to things other than just jaguar warriors.

Edit Edit: I'm also a moron and just realized that you meant blood vengeance damage, and not a bless for Mictlan in general. Ignore me.

Dirk the Average fucked around with this message at 07:07 on Sep 20, 2013

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

Fleur Bleu posted:

Had a dude cast mass regen on the jags; 550 bandits against 145 jags, 160 died.
With antimagic for the archers; 480 against 145, 72 died.
Also I did this:

All damage the Hannyas do is fire and they have 33 fire resistance and 17 mr.
That's 11755 gold in dead jaguars and 13600 in dead mages, without the jags even doing anything.

Yeah, that blood bless is looking hilariously cost effective against mages. It's not great against archers, but that's not the main reason you'd pick a B9 bless anyway. An N9B9 or potentially D9B9 (how does undying interact with second shape?) bless might make it even sillier by giving the jags even more hp to blood vengeance back out. D9 also has the advantage of death weapons, which helps your jags pack a bigger punch - I don't think regen on jags is necessarily the best investment. A minor nature bless might be worth it though, especially with dual forms giving effectively twice the hp.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."
Interesting little tidbit - there are apparently two extra Demon Lords now. Geryon, who is N/B/D, and Ashmedai, who is F/S/B. I assume they're new at least; they have no description available and everything that mentions Demon Lords from Dom3 only mentions four of them. I haven't tried either of them in battle, so I'm not sure if they've got any nifty abilities. Ashmedai has full slots and looks a bit like a Hinnom giant, Geryon has a head and two misc slots, and looks like an old Shedu with lizard hindquarters (he's also a heretic and has bringer of misfortune).

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."
I'd argue that Tien'Chi in either EA or MA is a great first choice of nation. You've got broad path access on your cap only mages, cheap researchers, and a broad selection of decent troops to play around with. You've even got decent sacreds in EA if you want to mess around with a bless. If you want to learn how blood works, Mictlan is an excellent choice, as blessed jags will carry your early game, and Mictlan priests with dowsing rods make for fantastic hunters once you start dabbling in more blood spells.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

LordSloth posted:

I'm a bit horrified, all things considered. I didn't realize things were quite this bad. Even though LA Atlantis is in much the same boat, I wasn't nearly as shocked. In fact, Angakoks might actually be a better buy than the oracles despite coming two eras later.

I always thought that was sort of how it was supposed to be - EA tends to have absurdly powerful cap-only mages, while LA has more institutionalized magic, so that your line mages tend to be great and your cap only mages are better, but not overwhelmingly so (or if they're better mages, they tend to not have really special things like flight, awe, being a giant, etc.).

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

Blisster posted:

Sailing is pretty cool you guys.



They put in a map setting to change sailing for certain maps. You can tailor the number of provinces that you can sail over to the amount of ocean/lakes/etc. on the map so that it's balanced.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

Flavahbeast posted:

Just a head's up, 3.99h has a bugged event that spams 70ish huscarls on any province with 2 or 3 misfortune, might want to hold off on starting mp games til its fixed

I was wondering what the hell was going on with that event when I played a test game and out of five provinces that I expanded to, three of them were invaded.

Quick question - how do you get gelatinous cubes? I saw several Ur armies running around with them, but I can't see any way to get them, nor does Ur appear to have any national spells that would summon them. The AI was also running around with crocodiles in their armies. Is it just intended that Ur spend gems to summon critters to lead with their beast masters, or is there something I'm missing?

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

Great Gray Shrike posted:

Cubes - Enchantment 4, 2W, Vile Water. Costs 8 water gems per cube.
Considering the research cost, and cost per cube, it doesn't seem that great; maybe if you find an enchantment discount site.

Crocs are summonable with conjuration 1.
Not sure about the beastmasters question.

Ah, that makes sense and explains where Ur was spending all of its gems. Spoiler: cubes fare really poorly against dual blessed Mictlan jags/bats/flying jags.

Kenlon posted:

Making it something you can set on a map by map basis is much saner, and doesn't involve any sort of new mechanics.

I agree with this. Dominions already has a ton of little things that can screw you over. Sailing is strong, but as long as the distance that you can sail is balanced on a map by map basis, it's just a good and powerful mobility option. It was absurd when you had maps built around a 1-range sailing suddenly use 2-range sailing.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."
So apparently there's a new patch. F9/D9 blesses have been changed so that they work on missile weapons, including magic weapons. Are there any sacred troops other than LA Tien'Chi ancestor vessels that have ranged weaponry? Also flaming arrows is now apparently automatic and works on all non-magic missile weaponry, so flaming sticks and stones from monkey nations could be amazing.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

Slaan posted:

Getting through that would be bad enough, but oh god the trumpeting! :gonk:

Oh man, master enslave on that province would be hilarious. That or the spell that turns everything into critters.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

tooterfish posted:

Oh, I restart once I've had a look at all that and tried to figure out what a workable strategy would be.

I just stick to the nation selected for me and try to make it work.

Something that might help is to look up the old dominions 3 guides. The information will often be out of date, but it will at least give an idea of what the nation's theme or overarching goal is, and will give you some ideas to springboard off of and various useful spells to look into. The most important out of date things are the blesses recommended by the guides - earth and nature have both changed significantly (as have death, air, and to a lesser extent, blood, but those weren't as recommended in the past).

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

LordLeckie posted:

9 is all you'd ever really need unless you really really really REALLY want master enslave to penetrate.

10 Points is just going to be too expensive and anything above that just isnt worth it to take a hit to your scales/dominion/sleepyness

It will upgrade your minor bless (+4 attack to +5, +4mr to +5, etc.), but yeah, it's really not worth it except for very specific niche cases.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

nessin posted:

3) Another missing improvement, is searching for sites still a one by one by one manual deal, or is there some way to automate it?

You can set up site searching spells to chain cast monthly until they run out of provinces within range (rituals have ranges now in Dom4 - Auspex is the biggest offender with a mere range 2), but sending mages off to sitesearch is still manual, yes.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

uPen posted:

Use 'M' instead of 'R' to cast the spell. Same goes for monthly forging, use 'O' instead of 'F'.

For clarity, if you have no commander selected, hitting those keys will issue orders to the command your mouse cursor is hovering over. If you have a commander selected, then hitting the key will issue orders to that commander regardless of cursor position.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

Jines posted:

Just won my first-ever game of Dominions, this game is loving amazing. And frustrating. I watched four successively larger armies (topping out around 850 heavy infantry with 15-20 mages) get completely wiped out by the enemy's pretender in his capital, a statue of war with mistform, fire shield, deflection, fear, and a bunch of other ridiculous poo poo. I ended up going for the thrones instead, which worked a hell of a lot better. I'm not even sure what I'd have done otherwise - what the hell do you do with a god that can kill an army that size without going below 50% health?

Drop a rock on its head. If your opponent is using magic, you should probably be doing the same thing - just tossing mages in there isn't necessarily going to do the trick. You're probably going to need to form a communion, pass out boosters/gems, or really just take some time to plan out what spells you want to bring the big guy down. For instance, if you had buffed your infantry with things like weapons of sharpness, strength of giants, fire resistance, and other such things, the statue would have likely been destroyed.

What happened in your case is that the enemy you went up against is able to simply chew up and spit out virtually unlimited numbers of unbuffed infantry. You need something with a bigger punch, whether it be buffed up infantry, thugs with weapons designed to counter the enemy statue, or a supercombatant with nice gear. The phrase "quantity has a quality all of its own" was not developed in a world where giant undead gods pulled from the depths of tartarus roam the lands.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

Every time I try to delete a saved game created in the same instance of Dominions 4 I get an error message:

"Failed to delete saved game. Maybe the file is open in another program."

Closing and re-opening the program takes care of it, but it's still really irritating when I'm trying to test SC builds. :(

Are you running as administrator? It might be trying to write saved games to a directory in program files.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

Superterranean posted:

Let's say I have a B9 bless, and I've also researched some Evocation. How do I script my mage-priests so they don't throw battle magic like idiots and die after they cast Blessing? I mean, I can keep them occupied for a few turns, but eventually they're going to run out of script. Do I just toss them in a corner of the map and hope the skirmish is out of range?

You can script them to stay behind troops instead of casting, but that seems a tad wasteful and might not work. Giving them bows and telling them to shoot isn't the best idea either, unless your sacreds happen to have shields.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."
Can someone help me see any value whatsoever in the monkey nations (Kalasia, Bandar Log, Patala)? Their recruit anywhere mages are pretty awful at 2S1N with no randoms, their sacreds and good mages are cap only and often slow to recruit, and none of their regular line troops are outstanding (and almost universally have low MR). Sure, you might be able to make a half decent communion from your 2S1N and your 1S mages, but other nations with astral have much better path diversity and will be able to leverage a wider variety of more effective battlemagic off of their communions.

I'm at a bit of a loss as to what you actually do with the nation. They don't really appear to have the ability to leverage sacreds well, they need magic diversity pretty badly, and their troops aren't that great, so an awake SC would be incredibly helpful. On top of that, they've got the ability to get great swarms of cheap small archers, except that those archers are undisciplined and they don't have fire magic so they can't cast flaming arrows anyway.

I feel like they'd be pretty good or at least decent if their line mages had any sort of magic diversity at all, really. It's also amusing that their best recruit anywhere priest is an independent priest, which certainly doesn't help their ability to take advantage of sacreds.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

Nuclearmonkee posted:

Excellent monkey-points

Fair enough, I think I overvalue good line mages when I evaluate a nation, and the monkey line mages are awful (except as communion slaves, but you do need to get a cap only mage to plug them into or they're just not useful). However, with shorter game lengths, cap-only mages and troops are going to be much more important than they were in Dom3 owing to the reduced number of fortresses that can be built in that time.

It also helps that their reduced MR isn't as big a deal when you consider that most of the really powerful late game spells that decimate armies through MR-negates stuff come too late to be all that important.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

dis astranagant posted:

Dai Oni are a terrible thug chassis because their rout themselves with the autosummoned dogs.

I remember hearing that autosummoned stuff no longer counts for HP routing, but I've never confirmed it.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

de_dust posted:

So I was having a mediocre albeit fun game, when suddenly I get the notice that my god had been permanently vanquished and those all-seeing-eye icons popped up everywhere in my nation. What happened?

The eye icons appear when the game is over so you can check things. If I had to guess why you lost, you probably ran out of dominion. Your capital, your temples, your god, and your prophet all produce white candles, or dominion every turn. The chance of a candle appearing is based on the dominion score you chose for your god at the beginning of the game. To check the values for how much dominion you're spreading each turn and the chance to spread dominion, click on a temple that you own and it should give you a breakdown.

Long story short, build lots of temples so that you don't get killed via dominion pushing. You can also set priests to preach to create dominion, but there's a limit to how high a priest can push the dominion of a province. Priests with the inquisitor ability are especially good at getting rid of enemy dominion, which appears as black candles.

If you happened to be playing EA or LA Mictlan, those nations have dying dominion, which means that the only way for them to spread dominion is through blood sacrifice, which is like preaching but has no cap in a province, requires blood slaves, and spreads dominion beyond that province. It's not as strong as it was in Dominions 3, but it's still a powerful ability.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

-Troika- posted:

Getting your pretender horror marked is basically a death sentence, right?

Depends on the god. Eventually they'll eat enough horror marks from horror attacks that they'll attract a big enough horror to eat them, but some gods last longer than others. If you've got a giant fuckoff dragon, for instance, it can easily eat a lot of horrors. If you've got a crone, on the other hand, she might just get eaten immediately the first time a lesser horror pops up.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

Torrannor posted:

How does that interact with pretenders like the phoenix? Will it get to the point that they will fight against horrors every single turn?

In theory, maybe? I haven't done extensive testing on how exactly horror marks work. An immortal pretender like the phoenix will die, then come back in the capital immediately. The net effect is the phoenix is likely to get afflictions and is going to lose any gear/gems that it has been given. It's also unlikely to be able to really ever leave the capital. You could still use it to forge stuff or cast spells though.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."
There's really just not enough data or experimentation with the new rules for balance mods to be useful yet. Dom4 is radically different from Dom3 in terms of the extended Dom3 midgame and that games will end much more quickly because of thrones.

About the only thing I'd love to see is some way to make national commanders more powerful and worth using. I'd like for it to be a good idea to recruit a strong cap-only or slow to recruit melee (no magic paths) commander and thug him out with gear for nations other than giants. It'd make armies feel a bit more like Warhammer Fantasy, where the right commander with the right gear in the right place can make a huge difference, but can't dominate the entire field on his own. I think a very simple way to do this would be to buff the hp on some of the cap-only national commanders - maybe 20-40hp would let them take a few hits and allow them to be put on the front lines. You'd end up with incentives to take more than one commander in an army, put more people on the front lines, and to use lots of really cheap gear.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

jBrereton posted:

On 'fixing balance with stats is boring', Jesus H Christ. It's an important part of a competitive game which is a big time investment. If you want to play inefficiently for 'roleplaying reasons' within a balanced framework, go ahead. Whatever. Asking people to put months into a game where some factions are significantly mechanically better than others, though, just not right.

I think it's more of the idea that they want to bring the nation up to par in ways other than just giving pale ones the same statline as a human.

I think they were talking about adding in mindblasting olms last I heard. Those would go a long way towards helping out - it's much easier to hit a paralyzed target! On that note, how do nets work? If they don't need an attack roll to hit, they could really buff up some classes of Agarthan infantry while still being thematically appropriate.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

Irony.or.Death posted:

That said, 1/turn hydras is still loving bullshit and I would stand outside Kristoffer's office with angry signs if I had time to fly to Sweden.

You're right, they should be slow to recruit! :v:

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

Roland Jones posted:

Stats kind of define a unit as far as the mechanics are concerned, though. If they're too low then they are bad, barring weird extra qualities. Saying that fixing the fundamental problem with a thing shouldn't be done because that's boring is ridiculous.

From what I understand, they want the pale ones to be worse in straight combat (accuracy and defence-wise, but not HP and damage-wise) than a human while fighting in daylight. They also want pale ones to be superior to humans in cave environments. At that point though, the pale ones need a gimmick to make them worth recruiting, as caves are just not nearly plentiful enough for that to be a good balancing factor, and at the moment they just don't have one. There are a lot of routes they could take to balance the troops out and make them superior to independents; bumping up stats isn't the only option.

I agree that their troops are terrible and this is a problem, but I also think that there are alternate methods of balancing them. Darkness power would be a good start. Mind blasting olms would let the pale ones ignore their attack deficit and rip poor paralyzed bastards to shreds. Nets could also perform a similar role and could be used to give wet ones a niche. Maybe their polearms could be adjusted to length 5 or 6 and have their attack penalty removed. Hell, make 'em a bit strange and give them three arms so that they can wield a glaive/pike/whatever and a shield.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

builds character posted:

You'd think they'd choose something more effective than agartha to keep them locked up then. Seal guard. :sigh:

Can you really keep a doom horror locked up? Better to give them something big and non-threatening as a meal so that they'll leave you alone. The Agarthans aren't so much guards as they are canaries in a coal mine.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

I Love You! posted:

If someone is coming at me with an army and I'm trying to combat it with Seeking Arrow, do I have to aim where the army is currently or where I think it will be next turn?

Everything is resolved in phases between turns. The magic phase goes before the movement phase, so you target where the army currently is.

Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

Neruz posted:

I want to be 100% certain that I can't bring the faction down to at least the top end of the 'balance scale' so to speak before I give up on that goal, we'll see.

Some things to consider - maybe make their armor not quite as good, but give them some decent natural protection. After all, if you're already made of stone, why bother wearing super heavy armor on top of it? As a bonus it makes them somewhat resistant to armor destruction spells.

For line troops, I'd more or less take the human statline, give some natural protection, make the armor a bit crappier (combined prot should be a few points higher than average), increase health a smidge (2-4 points), drop defense a bit (slow reflexes because stone), add a point or two of morale and magic resist, and drop AP by a bit (again slow because stone). You end up with dudes who are significantly tougher than humans, resistant to armor destruction, but easier to hit (making them weaker against two handers that do more damage and are harder to hit with) and are slower so that you can hold a line well, but can't really outflank an enemy with any reasonable speed.

You end up with slow and sturdy troops that are hard to break, but have a significant vulnerability against big weapons that hit for a lot of damage, which is a good thing. You can make several different varieties of dwarves with different weapons for different situations, but I'd be hesitant to give them any sort of super weapon or armor on anything that isn't some limited recruitment unit

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Dirk the Average
Feb 7, 2012

"This may have been a mistake."

Kitfox88 posted:

scales.png

i'm sad i didn't get to cast that con 9 mechanical men aid pd spell before everyone went ai, i wanted to see what a 100pd castle stack would have looked like :smith:

Were you just not recruiting mages or something? I have no idea how you managed that without upkeep eating you alive.

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