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Disclaimer: I've never been able to wrap my head far enough around Dominions to actually play the game, not with the time investment competing with things like 'work' and 'trying to be a functional person', but I loved Dom 3 enough in concept that I unwisely tried to learn the game anyways.  Unless Dom4 has made a major change to the dynamics of gem values, four pearls a turn is pretty sweet for a single province. Pearls are in some ways one of the most valuable gems; astral magic has some of the biggest, hardest-hitting abilities in the game which can't be fully replicated by any other school of magic, and I'd assume pearls can still be turned into all other gems at a rate of two for one, making a stockpile of astral gems a useful strategic reserve even for a nation that can't natively make much use of them. They're involved in the creation of some pretty sweet gear as well. Shifting your scales towards Misfortune is bad (potentially really, really bad), but unless you already have Misfortune 1 or 2 scales it's unlikely to be game-breaking. Some very, VERY nasty effects are unlocked the more misfortune you have, like losing every single magic gem stored in your labs(!), getting massive independent invasions of your provinces, or just generally being miserable and losing random resources every turn. If I understand the general math well enough though, when you have Luck scales, it's just a trade-off between reliable income (and four pearls a turn isn't bad), and the amount of good luck your scales bring. The effects of misfortune and luck events seem to diminish somewhat with empire size, since getting a handful of free gems or gaining or losing a random lab doesn't matter as much when your empire's huge, so reliable income is probably the safer bet in the long run. An important element of strategy many good players have always repeated is to site-search early and site-search often, because a small amount of reliable gem income per turn adds up very quickly, and every turn a site isn't giving you gems is a turn you're not getting the full use of your strategic resources. A good early source of pearls could add up to hundreds in the long run, and on average probably won't make or break the difference in Luck scales...as long as you don't already HAVE at least Misfortune 1, in which case you're exposing yourself to some pretty annoying possible events. AGAIN, this advice should be taken with a generous heaping of salt, probably enough to build a small Pretender with. E: Oh, and I quirk I forgot! Unless Dom 4 has changed things, you're limited to a maximum number of random events per turn (four, I think?), so by the time your empire is large enough to start brushing up against that limit, you're going to want to be investing in resources other than Luck. Luck can grant massive game-winning boons in the first year (and Misfortune can tank you in the same), but in the long run they become less important due in part to the hard cap on events. E2: Some forums digging suggests that it's a soft cap of 4, and some events ignore the 'cap', but due to diminishing returns you'd still be better off turning Luck into per-turn resources after just a few turns of game time if expansion's going well. Shady Amish Terror fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Oct 12, 2016 |
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Oct 12, 2016 01:27
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Ah, yeah, I'd forgotten about how a lot of the weird events require multiple scales to be at certain levels, my bad. Point stands in general that Misfortune 1 or 2 is usually not all that threatening except in the early game. Four pearls per turn IS pretty boss. I also failed to mention how the site density would affect the mental calculus as well, though I was at least vaguely aware of it; if this were a game with extremely low site odds, four pearls per turn would be an amazing coup, and the main reason it's not an automatic immediate 'yes please' in this game is partially because it makes less of a difference when there's magic sites everywhere. Am I wrong, however, in assuming that the throne merely shifts your scales one point towards misfortune? Given this nation has luck 2 to begin with it should be a very safe choice to just take the pearls. Boring, perhaps, but safe. uPen posted:Mis 2 is free scales unless you've got drain, death, growth, bad pd, or are just unlucky. I do love that both death and growth feed into terrible misfortune events. Growth is mostly utterly massive vine men invasions, if memory serves; death I'm unsure of. Massive plagues, skeleman uprisings, something like that?
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Oct 12, 2016 02:22
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Also fun thing to notice for people who might be less familiar with the game, Misfortune can go up to 3 just like any other national scale, but you'll notice very few people advocating in favor of taking it. There are some gonzo strategies that rely on having the worst scales possible (unless Dom 4 has significantly nuked them from the previous game), but Misfortune 3 is a lot of heartache for relatively little additional benefit otherwise. The bright side is that if you take terrible scales and are really good at spreading dominion, you can make a significant chunk of the world miserable for however many turns it takes for all your neighbors to agree to NAP's with each other in order to stamp you out. I'm also willing to assume that very little has changed from Dom 3 and if you DO decide to try to do this, people will catch on very quickly and will be very, very sour at you for it. Plus, you have to deal with your OWN terrible dominion the whole time. The primary advantage of building around Misfortune is usually that it gives you build points you can put into taking better scales which in turn will minimize the impact of Misfortune. Order directly counters the effects of Misfortune some by reducing the number of random events that happen. Having positive scales elsewhere (with the exception of Growth) helps you by not making you eligible for the really terrible events. If memory serves, there's also some fairly nice random events that require a combination of high Luck and high Order, which is not really a build many nations are going to favor, since Luck's effects are suppressed some by Order and it's very expensive to max both when you could just go full Turmoil instead to maximize the benefits of your Luck scale. Also, again, the events cap and the limits of the events themselves mean they matter less and less the longer a game goes on, good or bad. Unless you took Misfortune 3 and anything else, pretty much.
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Oct 12, 2016 08:19
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I looked this information up to make sure it was roughly the same between Dom3 and Dom4, and anyone is free to correct me should I say something stupid (again). For those unfamiliar with the game, you might be wondering, 'wait, the pretender God died? Isn't that their main character? What happens now?' The answer is...not a whole heck of a lot. That particular chassis (the term often used for what kind or what build of pretender God) is, as noted, not good for much beyond this point in the game. Losing your God doesn't have any immediate effect on your empire other than the loss of that unit. Now, you can revive your pretender God if they die, using the 'call God' command on units with priest levels. The way this works is that each priest with the command throws holiness equal to their priest level onto a pile every turn they have that command running. Some units get a bonus to doing this. Ultimately, when your priests have thrown enough bibles on the pile, your pretender reawakens! ...with some caveats. First, you don't control where your Pretender revives. They are teleported to your capitol. If your capitol happens to be under siege, this can have hilarious and short-lived consequences for that unit. I think it technically actually occurs during the magic movement phase, meaning that you could teleport in other units and have them all join the battle with your (unscripted) Pretender. There aren't going to be many situations where this is ever a good idea. Second, there's a very painful consequence to dying as a pretender, in that you lose one in each magic level you have when you're revived. If you had nature 2, you now have nature 1. If you had astral 7, you now have astral 6. If you had fire 1, you now just don't have fire magic anymore. Unless Dom4 has changed things, there is a silver lining in that this magic loss DOESN'T affect the power or availability of your nation's bless. [Similarly, you can't make your nation's bless stronger by empowering your pretender god with extra magic during the game.] Since most pretenders you would care about have magic paths and use them for something (even something as simple as self-buffing for combat), the loss of magic paths is a VERY painful consequence of death, and given how much priest-power it takes to revive a pretender, this means dead pretenders don't get revived all that often. If that wasn't bad enough, there's also a third caveat to revival! Most pretenders keep any afflictions or other debilitating long-term debuffs they might have had when they died. Afflictions can be gained through combat, and are inflicted more frequently when a unit that's low on health takes damage. So lost eyes, punctured lungs, withered limbs, all sorts of fun injuries. Your pretender might be returned to life, but they come as they are, not as they originally were. There are also some permanent debuffs later in the game which can be INFURIATING to deal with because they persist FOREVER, even after revival. That's not meant to be cutesy hyperbole either, there are a couple of dangerous debuffs that simply do not go away ever and will inevitably lead to a unit's death, over and over and over again if necessary. Finally, it is worth noting that there are exceptions to most of the points above. Some pretenders auto-revive as long as they died in a province under their dominion (I think this is the 'immortal' tag?), and if memory serves they don't suffer from the loss of magic path levels. So as long as you don't take that Pretender on adventures in areas that have black candles (or no candles), they can just keep fighting the good fight in their own holy lands. Some pretender chassis may be exempt from some of the problems above just as special features of that chassis, and some nations have priests that are very, VERY good at reviving pretenders and can reasonably get together to do so in a couple of turns rather than a few in-game years. There are ways of healing afflictions as well; some units regenerate naturally, and there are healer units that can be very useful for propping up particularly expensive units that get injured, if you can find them/have access to them. You could, technically, also replace a pretender's lost magic levels by empowering them to raise their magic levels, but this is a VERY expensive use of gems that could be seeing use against your enemies instead, so you shouldn't do so without an incredibly good reason! In in-game fluff reasoning, your pretender still essentially exists as long as there's at least one white candle of their dominion somewhere in the world, representing enough power of belief in that area to sustain them. Dying as a pretender isn't that devastating in the very big picture, since if your nation wins the ascension war, they could just call you back and fix you up, easy-peasy. The real threat is in the populace losing faith. If your dominion gets snuffed out, you do too, or at least your religion does. At that point, you're no longer a candidate in the ascension wars and you just lose, straight up. That's why everyone gets pissed when someone starts blood-sacrificing virgins on altars to spread their religion all over the world, incidentally; it's a legit existential threat and you can lose the game to having your religion snuffed out. Shady Amish Terror fucked around with this message at 22:01 on Oct 13, 2016 |
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Oct 13, 2016 21:51
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Hello Sailor posted:Alive and awake pretenders are also a source of "temple checks" to spread dominion. Ah, good call, I'd forgotten that. It's usually not too big a deal, though it can make a difference if you're up against a neighbor who's trying to domkill you.
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Oct 14, 2016 01:26
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...I am vaguely recalling a discussion in one of the old Dom3 threads about an infamous BoT rush strat. I assume the goal is to make any nation not leaning heavily on immortal spellcasters go AI out of frustration. The New Meta, impeded only by the incredibly long memories of the incredibly small Dominions community.
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Oct 19, 2016 16:15
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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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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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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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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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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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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, 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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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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I'm probably posting way too much, but it's been a rough day, so one more for the road. You cannot increase your Dominion score in-game outside of MAYBE some extremely rare events like claiming certain thrones (I'm not familiar with the effects of them all); like the bless effects, it's set in stone at the start. However, you can in practice bolster most of the effects Dominion has by building more temples. More temples means more successful temple checks regardless of your Dominion score, and temples even have the side benefit of raising the cap on how many Sacred units you can recruit in a turn just like higher domscore would. However, I don't think there's any normal way of increasing your innate Domscore or gaining the innate awe effect of 9 or 10 domscore if you don't already have it. Even Wishing for 'Dominion' just gives you candles, and similarly I believe that Wishing for magic paths can raise your Pretender's innate magic paths but will not improve their bless from the start of the game, nor can losing magic paths harm your bless from the start of the game (unless Dom4 has changed this, but I see no sources claiming as much).
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Oct 29, 2016 23:58
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Ramc posted:I think building temples helps your chargen dom score, or it at the least helps it for the purposes of recruiting uniques as it gives you more 'holy points' for recruitment purposes. I think I mentioned this, although jBrereton posted:5 temples per extra point up to ten, yep. I didn't have a number. Much appreciated. I thought it was four, but 1) I thought I might be wrong about the number, and 2) I apparently was wrong about the number.
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Oct 30, 2016 22:10
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That is so many monkeys. I can already see the potential for those tiny elephant stacks routing through the mass and forcing an HP-route, though. Dominions can be really harsh to large armies sometimes.
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Nov 3, 2016 05:53
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Dom 4's sound engine is another fascinating piece of the game's bizarre codebase. It addresses a simple problem in a very straightforward way...and deafens the user because it isn't very concerned with whether the resulting output is just a massive storm of amplified noise. It's like outsider art, and I kind of love it for that.
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Nov 4, 2016 04:36
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Yeah, Dominion scales from 1 to 10, and 6 is generally considered the lowest acceptable amount; any lower than that and you're at risk of any old schmuck realizing what you're playing at and sending in a bunch of stealthy heretics or something to Domkill you even if they can't just mass blood sacrifices. As was pointed out earlier, it apparently used to be even worse when Temple Checks were just a flat %10 times your Domscore chance of succeeding, meaning that with less than 5 Domscore you were at risk of just blipping out of Godhood even if no one was doing anything to you because your Temple Checks succeeded less than half the time. That is, it seems, no longer quite the case, but THE META still encourages at least 6 Domscore since that's what most other people will be taking as well. There's probably some slightly reasonable strategy involving lower Domscore, but it would have to be massively surefire and require a very exacting nation and pretender build, because lowering your Domscore under 6 is probably one of the worst trade-offs in power versus build points that you can take at the start, aside maybe taking the miracle Misfortune 3/Death 3/Drain 3 carousel.
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Nov 4, 2016 15:43
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Spoggerific posted:Are there any viable strategies that revolve around taking awful scales and then spreading them to your opponents' provinces too? There are a couple, and there were a couple more in Dom3. I don't recall the exact details of the builds, but LA R'lyeh has an insanity effect attached to its dominion (which I THINK most of its own units have some resistance to), and in Dom3 LA Ermor had a freespawn mechanic that generated units within its dominion. This meant there was powerful synergy in making your Dominion both as strong and as miserable to everyone else as possible. R'lyeh can attach temperature and production maluses to their Dominion, since they're an underwater magic-heavy nation and so are less affected by those things. LA Ermor, on the other hand, could go whole hog and make their dominion as miserable as possible. Death 3 in particular was popular as it generates more corpses for the necromancy that cares about such things, and it salted the earth by destroying the populations and supply capacity of Ermor-adjacent regions, while Ermor cared about neither money nor supply. LA games would become a flowchart of 'Does Ermor exist? If yes, can we organize an effective coalition to kill them without backstabbing each other? If yes, who managed to sit out the war and DIDN'T have their population and supplies eradicated? That person wins'. LA Ermor was a kingmaker in any game it didn't win. I don't think LA Ermor exists anymore. The major issue with having Dominion that's miserable to be in is that you're the player most affected by it. If your nation doesn't have an innate resistance to whatever makes your Dominion unpleasant, then it's not going to be a very good strategy, because it won't give you much of an edge over your neighbors who are also suffering from it. In Dom3, LA Ermor actually benefited from having terrible, unlivable Dominion scales, and it wasn't a very fun or fair thing to be going up against. The remaining examples are, as far as I know, all much milder. Man variants can get away with powerful Drain and Cold scales, some nations can take heat scales and fatigue their neighbors a little, some nations don't care much about supply or money and can take sloth or death scales. LA R'lyeh has resistance to its own madness effect, I believe, and so there's that, but it also comes with the double-edged sword of playing a water nation in the first place.
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Nov 4, 2016 16:48
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Well, glitches and maybe...three edge cases that are probably intentional? Depends on what's been changed between Dom 3 and Dom 4, what you mean by 'control', and in one case what you define as an astral horror, if I recall the unit viewer info and associated spells correctly. There are ways to get your hands on Astral Horrors, is the short answer, but I don't know if it's a particularly good idea as I'm not aware of how well the specifics work out.
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Nov 14, 2016 23:21
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It also warrants reiterating that horrors are nasty, NASTY business. If the fact that a handful of them decimated both of those armies wasn't clear indication enough, keep in mind that once horror-spamming starts in a game, it can take a while to fully run its course, if it even ever does, because the survivors of horror attacks usually gain the 'Horror Mark' affliction, which will cause horrors to periodically spawn to kill them until they succeed. This is ESPECIALLY nasty if you're relying heavily on your Pretender or some other super-unit, because even if they're strong enough to beat up lesser Horrors any successful attacks they make will probably just make the unit's Horror Mark affliction worse...and there are larger horrors out there. Much, much, MUCH larger horrors, statistically superior to any non-unique unit in the game. And they will keep spawning on Horror-marked units and will keep attacking them until they succeed in killing them. Also, barring any weird edge cases, Horror Marks are permanent. A unit that is Horror Marked is, eventually, doomed, though it may take a while before they're Horror Marked badly enough for it to be a problem if they're fairly strong. Horror Marks can't be removed by traditional healing, shapeshifting, or even revival from death.
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Nov 15, 2016 01:01
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There's a handy digital mod inspector here: https://larzm42.github.io/dom4inspector/ That contains most of the moddable elements like spells and units. To find horrors, you can click the Units tab on the left, and then the Type column on the right to organize critters by type; horrors have their own category. In particular, keep an eye out for 'Doom Horror' in the descriptions when you mouse over them; horrors described as such are the biggest of the big and the baddest of the bad.
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Nov 16, 2016 04:27
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Okay, the goat event is new to me. What a charmingly meaningless event.
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Nov 20, 2016 03:34
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I mean, if you're already winning, you could Gift of Reason, empower, and/or polymorph goats for funsies. You could.AfroSquirrel posted:If you have goats, there is a chance of them attracting a dragon. ...that would explain it.
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Nov 20, 2016 06:00
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Hello Sailor posted:Give every new scout a goat. goats are stealthy GOATS HAVE STEALTH This is important. Remote dragon attacks need to happen.
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Nov 21, 2016 06:10
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I'm having trouble placing the figure on the left, but dude on the right is some caveman or other indie trash mob with a spear critting for 999. Dominions actually does dice rolls for combat actions and has exploding crits, so technically that should be possible on any attack, but uh, the random number generation in Dom 3 wasn't very good, leading to this famous image being created (I think for one of the earlier LP's?): That nifty-looking pattern you're seeing in the background is a heat-plot of the output pulled from Dom 3's random number generator. As you can tell...it isn't very random, and no consecutive string of critical rolls could ever explode more than, I think it was about six times. 'Exploding' in dice rolls, if you're not aware, is usually re-rolling the die if you get a max roll and adding the results to your total roll until you roll something other than maximum. So, technically, any attack by any level 1 shitfarmer (or goat, or whatever), could paste any cosmic horror in a single strike, provided they made an impossibly long string of good critical rolls. In practice, not only would this be unlikely with random numbers, the RNG of Dom 3 literally didn't allow it. I don't know if that was fixed for this iteration of the game, but lethal, debilitating wounds can still cause giant man-eating Anaconda gods to bleed out from some dude punching them or towering two-story-tall lightning-flinging giants to become feeble-minded and lame from a vicious halfling kick.
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Nov 22, 2016 08:25
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Flying raiders are potentially one of the most frustrating, difficult tactics to properly counter. They can bounce around your undefended core at their own whims; as demonstrated, though, a lot of fliers don't do well against even relatively simple troops as long as there's enough of them.
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Nov 24, 2016 07:52
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Dirk the Average posted:I don't see the issue. Optimal play is to spend a couple of years recruiting Niefel Giants before invading your first neutral province, so a level 2 throne should be no problem. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is a reference to that hilarious 'strategy guide' someone wrote up for Dominions single-player, yeah? I mean, I've got no room to make fun of how other people spend their time, but that thing was just...charmingly naive of the depth of the system.
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Nov 29, 2016 09:32
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Yeah. Construction only gives you new craftables every even level (the odd levels mostly unlock oddball spells and summons, a few of which are pretty decent, if niche), and each even level is loads more powerful than the last. Level two is fairly vital for charms, level four gives you a slew of gear, and if memory serves level six starts unlocking some of the better end-game boosters. Meanwhile, it's still good to diversify your research because when you're at the point that you're reaching for levels seven and eight in research you can grab a couple levels in something else in a single turn, unlocking a bevy of new goodies. The meta might have changed, but this was A Thing in Dom 3 for many nations' endgame plans, because you could follow a normal research curve throughout most of the game, and then dump the collective might of your research engine into Blood at the end-game in order to rapidly unlock that toolset in a pinch.
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Nov 30, 2016 01:53
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A Good and Cool thing to point out, yeah. Another useful application of Construction tech is actually in Research boosting items. If you're making use of big piles of middling power researchers or unimportant magicians for your magical research, one way to boost the effectiveness of your research program is to forge items like the Owl Quill that give a bonus to research instead of magical paths. Knowing when and how much to do this is just another part of the gigantic, sprawling optimization problem that is Dominions, but I'm going to hazard the guess that it depends HEAVILY on what kind of gems you can afford to spend and whether the cost-benefit is better than just buying up more cheap researchers; if you have access to some kind of cheap sage unit that does research extraordinarily well and nothing else, and you're not relying heavily on gold, it would probably be cheaper to buy more researchers than to buff the existing ones (which also requires the time of at least one mage FORGING those items).
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Nov 30, 2016 05:33
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Oh hey, Those Guys. Do they still have their special 'Attack Commanders' script? It was possible in Dom3 through shenanigans to copy that attack order to other units, though it was generally considered Bad Juju and one of the few in-game tactics almost universally frowned upon, not least of all because Attack Commanders is such a powerful goddamned command. E: poo poo, uh, update at the bottom of last page for anyone just popping in.
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Dec 9, 2016 03:57
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'Hey I edited my turnfile to give a ruinously powerful command to my units that the game normally doesn't allow any access to whatsoever, that's cool, guys, right?' For all I know, sure, Dominions' server-side turn verification might happily accept it. You might be able to find a group of players who'd be fine with allowing that as a rule in a game at the outset. But it would also be an obvious exploit if Dominions 4 has, apparently, explicitly gone out of its way to eliminate the normal means of doing so. The pool of Dominions players is usually pretty small, so there's generally an incentive to not piss everyone off.
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Dec 9, 2016 13:45
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Cold aura, fear, have a shield and above-average stats for infantry? It's kind of a shame that site doesn't just let you recruit or summon them, they seem like they'd be an excellent sink for gold or a death mage's time in producing hardy chafe. Granted, I guess it doesn't matter much at this stage of this kind of game, but it would be cool, drat it!
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Dec 17, 2016 21:55
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Apocron posted:Does the Oath Stone affect all your fortress provinces? Pretty sure from the description of the situation that the Oath Stone only affects the province it's in, and not even that if you have a fortress there since that changes your PD composition, which is a drat shame in this case.
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Dec 19, 2016 01:23
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Voyager I posted:please tell me it's not normal to have forts in literally every province outside your cap circle in normal midgames. Mo Money is probably to blame here. I was going to make a joke about spamming Mott and Baileys, but apparently Dom4 massively simplified castles overall (which is good, I guess).
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Jan 11, 2017 03:22
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PurpleXVI posted:
AI for videogames is difficult. AI for strategy games is notoriously difficult. AI for a strategy game more complicated than Risk is a herculean endeavor. AI for a strategy game with a problem space as large as Dominions has probably never been done well, by anyone. The Dominions AI in 4 is probably better than in Dom 3 (or I'd hope so, at least!), but Dominions AI is sort of infamous for cultivating giant doom blobs of extremely questionable and poor unit compositions and then expending them in stupid ways. Occasionally it will hit upon frustratingly powerful armies simply by the sheer volume of units it likes to mass, but from what I recall it basically employs no strategic decision-making at all and won't make any specific effort to counter battlefield evocations spam or skeleton spam or mind-hunting or any other of the myriad strategies a player can use to neuter an unwary opponent. If I recall right, I think the AI also preferentially spends gems on summoning units before casting rituals or crafting gear, so they often have piles of low-level summoned garbage around.
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Jan 14, 2017 00:13
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Dom4 apparently still has a soft limit for how many events you can get in a turn, so unless the birds significantly overcome that issue there's limitations to the strategy, but it sounds like a decent way to get some nice bonus income if you're in a position to take advantage of it. Dominions is pretty big on taking advantage of as many small optimizations as you can to build up to huge advantages in the long run, which is part of what makes the game intimidating and difficult to get into for new players. On the other hand, if the increased event odds can significantly increase the number of events you get in a turn, that could turn into a HUGE boon over time if a player is allowed to mass the birds. My understanding from what I last read was that while Dom4 is less restrictive than Dom3 (which had a more-or-less hard cap of 4 or so random events in a turn), you're still not going to see much more than that on any normal turn. E: Corbeau posted:Birdonomics. It's super obnoxious to disrupt if they're all hiding in a fort. Wait, are you implying that normal Luck event rules apply, so invading armies are going to get hit by Misfortune 3 events every single turn while trying to siege a firebird fort? Because if so  
Shady Amish Terror fucked around with this message at 09:12 on Jan 14, 2017 |
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Jan 14, 2017 09:07
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Reading around a bit, I couldn't find a conclusive statement on the matter with regards to Dom 3 (which is where most of my limited Dominions knowledge stems from), and it looks like it's almost certainly not the case for Dom 4. I phrased that a bit poorly, because I thought you were suggesting that the 'enemy luck is misfortune' thing was conclusively proven with firebirds, which would be amazing, but apparently isn't the case. I thought that it WAS the case for Dom 3 (or that at least Luck scales became neutral in the event of enemy dominion), and that, again, you were suggesting that Firebirds proved the link in Dom 4. My apologies for the confusion, I misunderstood what you were saying slightly.
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Jan 14, 2017 16:32
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Culka posted:Apparently each bird has a separate chance to cause a positive event. Here's what a normal turn looks for a Bogarus who has summoned a lot of birds: Holy fuuuuuck. Gem-gens were wisely removed to cut down on the sheer amount of economic tedium, as I understand, so instead there are birds. All hail birds.
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Jan 15, 2017 20:38
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