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Yeah, I believe the way the game handles different paths across forms is that they all have the same base paths with each form applying different modifiers to the levels.
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Oct 22, 2016 21:27
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Note: a Wish, for the bargain price of 100 Astral Pearls, allows you to (among other things) summon one of just about anything in the game, including one of those. Granted, a Wish won't summon the 4 Ophanim as well, but I think (I've never actually used that spell) that the extra Ophanim summoned are units, not commanders, which robs them of a great deal of what makes them
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Oct 22, 2016 21:37
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That is really stupidly expensive. Global spells, massive remote assassination campaigns, and, yes, the power to literally just Wish things into existence all cost less. That is a neat unit, for all its bizarre faults, but I have no idea what the intended niche for such a unit is (other than flavor, which has long been an excuse for a lot of Dominions periphery fluff). I also love the whopping 1 research strength, which I suspect is a victim of the bizarre shape-changing gimmick and the massive magic path anti-boosters used for it.
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Oct 22, 2016 21:42
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I feel like there's got to be some use for a stealthy flying self-blesser with inv, awe and full slots but probably not a good enough one to bother with.
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Oct 22, 2016 21:52
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senrath posted:Yeah, I believe the way the game handles different paths across forms is that they all have the same base paths with each form applying different modifiers to the levels. Correct. The -6 to various paths is part of the background mechanics that the game requires so that in the first form the Chayot has S4, second form A4, third form F4, and E4 in the fourth form. The_Final_Stand posted:Granted, a Wish won't summon the 4 Ophanim as well, but I think (I've never actually used that spell) that the extra Ophanim summoned are units, not commanders, which robs them of a great deal of what makes them good not entirely overpriced garbage. Correct! The 4 Ophanim that accompany the Chayot are troops, meaning that you get the privilege of spending either 20 Nature or 25 Pearls to transform them into commanders i.e. make them even the tiniest bit useful. Dominions!  Shady Amish Terror posted:That is really stupidly expensive. Global spells, massive remote assassination campaigns, and, yes, the power to literally just Wish things into existence all cost less. That is a neat unit, for all its bizarre faults, but I have no idea what the intended niche for such a unit is (other than flavor, which has long been an excuse for a lot of Dominions periphery fluff). I also love the whopping 1 research strength, which I suspect is a victim of the bizarre shape-changing gimmick and the massive magic path anti-boosters used for it. It's nuts, I think it is one of the single most expensive spells in the game if not the most. If I even survive this game long enough to make it to the point where I can afford to cast (and have a mage capable of casting!) Call Merkavah I may have to do it and then set the Chayot in the Lab, researching away. If I ever did that it would be fine, because honestly if you are in the position to waste 222 Pearls for fun you are already winning the loving game. How are u fucked around with this message at 22:12 on Oct 22, 2016 |
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Oct 22, 2016 22:10
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Also, this being a Dom game, it's going to go completely off script when it form changes, and probably cast something really dumb and fatigue causing while whatever it was that just killed it is still standing next to it.
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Oct 22, 2016 22:41
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How are u posted:It's nuts, I think it is one of the single most expensive spells in the game if not the most. If I even survive this game long enough to make it to the point where I can afford to cast (and have a mage capable of casting!) Call Merkavah I may have to do it and then set the Chayot in the Lab, researching away. If I ever did that it would be fine, because honestly if you are in the position to waste 222 Pearls for fun you are already winning the loving game. 
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Oct 22, 2016 22:42
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Thread Art! I love it! Hopefully I'll live long enough to make good on that promise, we'll see how the game goes! Now I need to make a spot in the OP for art.
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Oct 23, 2016 01:02
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This is extremely good.
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Oct 23, 2016 01:33
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Is there any fluff text for describing what magic research is supposed to be like?
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Oct 23, 2016 01:35
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Really, if your summon spell costs well more than 100 whatever period, then you're probably better off just wishing for it. There is precisely one summonable unit(s) in the game that you can't get via Wish, and that singular one uses blood slaves. It's still ludicrously expensive, but at least with blood slaves you can actually bring in far more of them than you can any other gem type, so it's not quite as bad. Those are the Grigori set of unique commanders, incidentally. Trying to Wish for a Grigori will get you an utterly worthless commander named Grigorius the Grigori. At 30 hp, 0 leadership, and immobile, it's a giant joke. Anything else, with Seraphs probably being the most common choice if you're actually wishing for a commander, is perfectly fine to Wish for.
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Oct 23, 2016 02:52
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resistentialism posted:Is there any fluff text for describing what magic research is supposed to be like? If memory serves, it's mostly pretty much raiding the old Pantokrator's libraries and piecing together second-hand what they or their subordinates did for certain magical effects, or figuring out what celestial/ethereal/demonic beings even exist and how to bind them. Most in-game fluff on research is actually implied by spell descriptions (a little), or in the descriptions of research-boosting items like Owl Quills, Lightless Lanterns, and shrunken heads, most of which imply that they ease transcribing results or finding hidden (and possibly taboo/forbidden/cursed/secret) knowledge. I'm not intimately familiar enough with the game to know if anything is more explicit than that. Lord Koth posted:Really, if your summon spell costs well more than 100 whatever period, then you're probably better off just wishing for it. There is precisely one summonable unit(s) in the game that you can't get via Wish, and that singular one uses blood slaves. It's still ludicrously expensive, but at least with blood slaves you can actually bring in far more of them than you can any other gem type, so it's not quite as bad. I am pretty sure Grigorius is also prone to disappearing at his own whims, and he might be naturally insane as well? Shady Amish Terror fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Oct 23, 2016 |
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Oct 23, 2016 04:20
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I thought Gath had some type of synergy with the horrible wasteland provinces any chance of seeing any of that?
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Oct 23, 2016 06:30
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Lord Koth posted:Really, if your summon spell costs well more than 100 whatever period, then you're probably better off just wishing for it. There is precisely one summonable unit(s) in the game that you can't get via Wish, and that singular one uses blood slaves. It's still ludicrously expensive, but at least with blood slaves you can actually bring in far more of them than you can any other gem type, so it's not quite as bad.
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Oct 23, 2016 11:04
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Cant you wish for them by wishing via their unit ID rather than their name? I believe that works?
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Oct 23, 2016 13:05
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tankfish posted:I thought Gath had some type of synergy with the horrible wasteland provinces any chance of seeing any of that? Unfortunately, there is not a single Wasteland type province in our entire nation.
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Oct 23, 2016 15:18
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Ah well probably for the best then I thought only one of those spells was useful anyway.
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Oct 23, 2016 15:48
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:Cant you wish for them by wishing via their unit ID rather than their name? I believe that works? 
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Oct 23, 2016 21:03
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The Best Thing is wishing for Doom Horrors. You'll even get one at it'll be under your control! With like a 30% chance per turn of going hostile and attacking you. Not that people haven't figured out ways to get around this and keep the ludicrous magic paths some of them have.
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Oct 23, 2016 21:53
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Turn 20 Turn 20 begins with a whole bunch of site-searching reports, and we found several! First we found this on our Throne province, a free fort! Unfortunately we don’t get a refund for the citadel we were building there, but at least we don’t have to wait 5 more turns for the fort.   Another downside that I didn't become aware of until much later: our in-construction fortress did not get overwritten, it got "frozen" in limbo. Thus, when I try to get a commander in the province to construct a defensive fortification upgrade to our Firbolg Fortress it is impossible, because the original fort is still "under construction".  Then there’s this Pyramid of Life with a death gem and astral pearl. Not spectacular but not bad.  Finally we found two sites in Boar Woods and they are great:   4 earth gems just from Boar Woods! This turn we actually quadrupled our earth gem income from 2 to 8, really great stuff. The rest of the messages for the turn consist of: - A couple scouted battles of little interest. - Random events: some increasing growth in provinces as a result of the Throne of Gaia being claimed last turn, some +gold and some +gem events. - A whole poo poo-load of our scouts being caught and killed by Xibalban patrollers. Other than site discoveries the messages for the turn are uneventful. However, there are two things I noticed other than messages that concern me. First is that our Dominion is being pushed, and hard.  We have lost dominion in most of our eastern provinces, bordering Xibalba. This is because Xibalba, who has 24-26 provinces, has seemingly put a temple in every last one of them. His dom-spread power is much, much higher than mine and that is bad, because if you lose all your dominion you simply cease to exist. This is actually something to really be concerned about, so I am building several new temples this turn and will build several more next turn. I’m also going to start sacrificing the blood slaves that I got from random events. Additionally, I will take a group of Kohen priest-mages and begin blood hunting. I wasn’t planning to start blood hunting until a little bit later, but we will need slaves to sacrifice to push our dom ASAP. The second thing is this army:  That’s a big stack of Caelum’s Mammoths, it looks like an army, and it could be heading towards me. I really don’t want to fight Caelum, but hopefully if I had to I could count on Pangaea to join me, as he told me he was planning to invade Caelum anyway. I send an IRC PM to Caelum letting them know that Pan is going to invade them, hoping that that knowledge will keep him from invading me. We’ll find out more later. Turn 20 Retrospective: Well the first thing to acknowledge is that we are alive, that’s great. We’ve made it this far and are not currently in a war, which is also great. The previous Mo Money game I played taught me that early wars are very bad, and turtling for a little bit to research is really helpful. Hopefully we’ll be ready for our first war in 7 turns or so. The thing I regret so far are the scales I took. Since I haven’t been in a war yet I am not sure how useful my double-bless has really been. I do know for sure that the absolutely terrible scales I took have been a huge hindrance in building up my infrastructure, and I feel very weak for it. I feel vulnerable with so many provinces unforted and without temples, and I fear that that will put me behind the curb in terms of research and power compared to other nations. I am feeling that this turn with the aggressive Xibalba dom push. I really hope I can counter-act that, or I will be in serious trouble. Basically at this point in the game I feel a little bit hamstrung. Things are moving too slowly, I want to be running a full capacity yesterday and that is feeding into what I call the Dominions Paranoia. Hopefully things break my way soon.
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Oct 26, 2016 01:46
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I really like Dom threads. So happy to see an update. I tried to play Dom 3 with goons but I just didn't have the time to learn the game well enough. I kept getting killed to things I didn't know how to counter. I think the big one was mind flayers, when I worked out my only hope was Mindless Automatons it was already too late. Great game to read about though! As for the LP in progress, that Dom crash is really scary, I wouldn't be surprised if he was preaching all your borders. Do the batman get any stealthy priests?
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Oct 26, 2016 01:56
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My first appearance, in Iron Range in the last screenshot! Xibalba's dom push is affecting me severely too but I haven't noticed that yet.
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Oct 26, 2016 02:06
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Phrosphor posted:As for the LP in progress, that Dom crash is really scary, I wouldn't be surprised if he was preaching all your borders. Do the batman get any stealthy priests? It's worse. I don't want to give the game away, but I will say it has something to do with all of the scouts of ours that bit the dust this turn.
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Oct 26, 2016 02:26
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How are u posted:It's worse. I don't want to give the game away, but I will say it has something to do with all of the scouts of ours that bit the dust this turn. Oh dear. I didn't play Dominions for that long, but I played long enough to realize what this is 
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Oct 26, 2016 03:44
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Honestly it feels like with that double bless you should be focusing on wars early on, no? I'm not an expert, but I do know that early on is when unit spam is the most effective, and I'd imagine blesses favor being aggressive with your armies.
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Oct 26, 2016 05:33
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Generally speaking, that is CLOSE to the accepted wisdom, as far as I know. One of the biggest benefits of a bless for most bless-amenable nations is the ability to be more aggressive, earlier. You generally need to tank your scales to afford a bless, and the effect your scales have on your nation is (usually) at its smallest at the start, with small benefits and detriments being magnified over the course of the game as your empire grows in size and has to compete over time with other nations (and their scales). You don't necessarily HAVE to enter an early war, either; simply being aggressive enough to expand slightly faster than your neighbors can give you the long-term boosts you need to win over them. However, since most nations that favor bless strategies are monsters in the early game, they often end up in early wars either to try and neutralize particularly worrying neighbors or because their neighbors gang up on them (and if you win a multi-front war from the outset, your odds of taking the game in a steamroll are pretty drat high). So, you don't necessarily want or need to be in an early war, but if you've been aggressively expanding the odds are simply better of ending up in one. A mid or late-game bless strategy is a little unfamiliar to me, outside of the context of having mid-game thugs in a bless nation who can bless themselves as a stopgap while you use your territory gains to catch up to and pass everyone else's magic research.
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Oct 26, 2016 15:19
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I'm certainly no expert, but I've found that a mid-game Bless is quite useful if you have good Sacred summons.
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Oct 26, 2016 18:36
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When I built The Might of Zionism I never intended to use the double-major Bless for an early war. Sure, if one of our neighbors got jumped on turn 12 or something and was losing badly I would have taken the opportunity to seize a handful of free provinces, but the lesson I learned from the first Mo Money game was that nobody who jumped into an early war ended up in the end-game. The merits of early aggression are worth debating, but it certainly was never part of my plan for this game. Another lesson I learned from the first Mo Money is that recruit anywhere sacreds are useful, even lovely ones like our Levite Zealots. One of the nations in that game was LA Agartha, and in the early end-game he had thousands of his recruit anywhere sacred Blindfighters running around. However, they didn't have a bless of any significance, so it was kind of a wasted opportunity in that regard. My strategy is to get to the point where I can have thousands of Levite Zealots running around with our double bless. The end-game is going to be full of battlefield-clearing evocations and other powerful spells, but the B9 component of the bless can really punish enemy mages. Say an expensive, powerful mage wearing forged magic boosting items casts Earthquake or Shadow Blast or Shimmering Fields and wipes out 10, 20, or 40 Levite Zealots. The B9 bless will reflect some of that damage back on the mage, probably killing him straight dead. Ideally, this bless will remove a tactical choice from our enemies' arsenal, that's the purpose.
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Oct 27, 2016 03:02
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Turn 21 Turn 21 begins with an announcement that our Prophet, A Bulldozer for Palestinian Homes, has claimed the Throne of Misfortune. I didn’t want to take the +misfortune hit but we are in panic-mode regarding our dwindling dominion. This entire turn is basically a frantic reaction to impending dom-death. Next we see a failed site-search attempt, which sucks but is no biggy. Update on the Man – Patala war. Man has Patala’s capitol under siege now, things are not looking good for the apes. Patala isn’t out just yet, though, they still have a bunch of castles, so I hope to see them hit back and deal Man a bloody nose.  We also see a scouted battle where some independents attack Bogarus. A couple of Earth Gnomes and an Earth Elemental rise up and attack his province defense! I believe they're part of a handful of attacks that are triggered when the Throne of Gaia is claimed, something about forces of nature fighting back or whatever.   Weird, useless creatures. Then we have four events: - Fertility festival! Yay!  - Poorly trained militia in Grey Mountain, Province Defense reduced by 5  - Earthquake struck and knocked down our temple in Boar Woods?! Fuuuuck! This is the worst kind of thing to happen right now, we need every temple we can get! - +6 nature gems, great, I’m still salty about the temple. Speaking of temples, we spend every last bit of gold we have constructing four new temples, and next turn we will replace the one that just got knocked down by that loving earthquake. We are scrambling hard to do everything we can to boost our dominion. Take a look at this turn’s dominion score graph:  Still going down, gently caress me. I am officially panicked. We set our Prophet to perform sacrifices and we move two more Kohen Gadol out of our capitol and towards templed provinces so that they can begin to sacrifice as well. Only one priest can make sacrifices per temple, so only one per province. We also set a dozen of our Kohen priests in two provinces to begin blood hunting. This is going to cause unrest which we will have to patrol down, but we need slaves. We need lots of slaves so we can do lots of sacrifices to save our skin. I now suspect that Xibalba is aggressively blood sacrificing with the hope of dom-killing people. I’m going to reach out to Pangaea and see if he would go to war with Xibalba, because that poo poo is a threat to every one of his neighbors.  Time to grab some virgins  Also, look at those Black Candles, that's Xibalba's Dominion deep in our territory!Finally, we lose 3 scouts to Xibalban patrols. Those patrols, they’re Xibalba patrolling down unrest while he blood hunts. This is bad, this could be fatal. Next turn: we try to build a coalition, lots of temples, and sacrifice a lot of virgins. How are u fucked around with this message at 21:23 on Oct 29, 2016 |
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Oct 29, 2016 20:56
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Does blood hunting with a bunch of units in one province actually work? I always thought it was limited to 1 hunter/province, or that there was severe diminishing returns or something like that.
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Oct 29, 2016 21:05
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Viking_Helmet posted:Does blood hunting with a bunch of units in one province actually work? I always thought it was limited to 1 hunter/province, or that there was severe diminishing returns or something like that. Oh, friend, if you want to maximize your blood slave income you have to hunt with more than one hunter! Somebody who actually knows the meat of the mechanics will have to elaborate, but as far as I am aware the best blood hunting practices are to hunting with 4-5 mages at a time. The higher the level of Blood Magic each mage has the more slaves you'll pull in, though I think you start to get diminishing returns if their level is higher than 3B.
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Oct 29, 2016 21:21
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From what I recall from Dom3 (and some quick googling doesn't seem to reveal any changes), there might be some diminishing returns on blood-hunting, but it's still better to confine it as few provinces as you can reasonably manage, since you're going to have to patrol down unrest and reduce the province population which will also reduce the province's gold and resource output. Relatively barren, low-pop provinces near the heart of your domain can make pretty good sites to squat a half-dozen blood hunters on and start dredging out the sacrifices, and with empowerment and blood-hunting gear it's a good investment as soon as you get the chance, if your long-term plans involve blood at all. E: I mean, I don't know how THE META may have changed, but in general, most endgame plans leaned heavily on one of either astral magic, blood magic, or some unique strength of your nation. Blood is the most controllable of these, your blood income can be expanded by as many blood-hunters and provinces as you feel comfortable expending and is self-reinforcing in strength, but in turn is the biggest pain in the rear end and requires additional micro-management. If you have powerful blood, you literally don't even need other magic most of the time. But in turn, you've got to have a bunch of blood hunters, you've got to ferry those blood slaves around, and it becomes a giant logistics exercise that you have to manage every turn, even moreso than most other lategame situations. Shady Amish Terror fucked around with this message at 21:28 on Oct 29, 2016 |
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Oct 29, 2016 21:22
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I have to admit I've always been a BIT vague on the Dominion mechanics. But is it at all possible for hostile dominion to sweep into a province that has one of your temples? Or are they entirely safeguarded?
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Oct 29, 2016 21:28
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PurpleXVI posted:I have to admit I've always been a BIT vague on the Dominion mechanics. But is it at all possible for hostile dominion to sweep into a province that has one of your temples? Or are they entirely safeguarded? 100% possible. If your Dominion is stronger and you are making a ton more Temple checks each turn you can steamroll your Dom right over a neighbor's provinces, temples or no. e: that's a great explanation, thanks! vvvvvv How are u fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Oct 29, 2016 |
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Oct 29, 2016 21:36
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Temples and blood sacrifice and pretenders and some sites and some other units generate what are called 'temple checks', which are slightly randomized chances to move the Dominion of a province one candle higher towards your own. The more dominion already in a province (up to a maximum where ALL temple checks spill out), the more of these shifts will happen in neighboring provinces. Higher Dominion scores means either more Temple Checks or more successful ones, I can never remember which. Either way, if the opponent is pushing dozens of black candles of heretical dominion into your provinces every turn with massive blood sacrifices, you have to generate just as many successful temple checks in turn to negate them, or you will slowly succumb as belief in your Pretender completely evaporates. This is why Domkill is so scary and why Dominion score is such an incredibly important stat and should never be low; if you're significantly behind the curve on temple checks, you WILL lose unless you can stop the bleeding, and since you're not usually going to be able to match the dominion output of a nation geared up and ready to commit to Domkilling you, you're on a timer before every candle on the map belongs to that Pretender. E: This also helps to explain why Domkill can be a viable end-goal strategy. When you Dom-kill a neighbor, their Pretender disappears, and their nation goes dead. Now that's a bunch of mostly-free provinces right next to you for the taking, and one less person pushing back against your one-world-religion revolution. Additionally, if you're fast and good about your domkill rush, your neighbors all go dark before anyone can organize against you, and now everyone who DOES want to kill you probably has to push through all of those empty junk provinces before they can even reach your megachurches and televangelists, wasting even more time as you ramp up your operations. Shady Amish Terror fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Oct 29, 2016 |
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Oct 29, 2016 21:38
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Yeah, I've rarely had a lot of wrangle with being domkilled because I tend to have my dom score at 9 or 10 candles right out of chargen. At best it means I'm the one doing the domkilling, at worst it means that trying to domkill me is a relatively fruitless endavour.
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Oct 29, 2016 22:15
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Yeah, conventional wisdom holds that a Domscore of below 6 is fairly dangerous, and higher is generally better. One interesting tidbit is that dominion is a sort of balance tilt baked right into the mechanics; if two players aren't generating exactly the same number of successful temple checks every turn, EVENTUALLY the player generating more successful checks on average is going to win by Domkill even if they're both completely stalemated at the strategic level. However, since most players take high dominion for protection and dominion spread is fairly slow unless you were built to do blood-sacrifice domkilling in the first place, this is almost never going to be relevant. Most players will decide long drawn-out games on the battlemap by a single decisive conflict or by simply being the last person to not quit LONG before passive dominion spread is relevant. In the meantime, taking high dominion helps to ensure there's a lower ratio of enemy temple checks overwhelming your own candles of religion when someone does go for a domkill, giving you a much longer timer to deal with them before your religion disappears. E: Actually, I've not personally seen it happen, but I imagine two players far apart on the map jointly agreeing to a blood-sacrifice frenzy at once would be a huge existential threat to the rest of the players in the game. Granted, I might not have seen this just because, uh, I don't play Dominions.  Of course, that might be at just enough of a level of Right Bastardry that people would be leery of joining any games with those players in the future.
Shady Amish Terror fucked around with this message at 23:40 on Oct 29, 2016 |
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Oct 29, 2016 23:37
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Until you meet a domkill monster who rolls over you in an unending expansion wave.
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Oct 29, 2016 23:39
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At which point you should be diplomancing them to death instead.
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Oct 29, 2016 23:42
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 20:47 |
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Diplomacy is commonly held to be the most powerful weapon in a Pretender's arsenal. Unless you're that one dude.
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Oct 29, 2016 23:44
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