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AfroSquirrel posted:This is how most Dom games get started to be fair. "Yo what if I just mass Turkeys?" "Hey, there's some pretty good jokes I could make with these names." "...I think I can cast Burden of Time in less than twenty turns." "Ha, the spreading insanity of 'Free-Market Capitalism'. Classic." "I wonder what happens if every province in a nation is at maximum unrest." "What if you got to build your own nation?" "Draft games are fun. Wait. What if I got to build EVERYONE ELSE'S nation?"
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Jan 20, 2017 23:00
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They are all True Stories of Dominions, but I think the turkey strat is the only one that appeared in a completed LP. I think so anyways?
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Jan 22, 2017 05:32
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An incredible exchange.
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Jan 23, 2017 12:02
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Thaum 6 has a lot of chaff, situationally-useful stuff, and things that exist purely for flavor, just like most of Dominions. I dunno, maybe there's some way to pair Leprosy with some other remote attack to cripple large conventional armies? Enslave Mind at least is a spell particularly known for its use in Shenanigans of The Highest Order, but since it is MR-resistable and only targets one unit at a time, it has very limited applications outside of comedy.
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Jan 24, 2017 06:20
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...bleed the beast? Also looking forward to 'Wither Bones' inevitably getting shown off against the Transylvanian hordes, because it wouldn't really feel like Dominions if several or all current plans weren't going catastrophically wrong.
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Jan 24, 2017 17:50
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PurpleXVI posted:Is it normal for an AI opponent to hang in there that long? Or do they usually get chewed up in short order? Little of column A, little of column B. The AIs ARE being eaten through aggressively by all their neighbors, but since you'll typically be moving one or two territories at a time unless you've got a lot of raiding groups set up, it can take a while, and it's very common to run into a situation like the dragon and the siege there where you have to go out of your way for multiple turns to deal with Pretenders, sieges, murderballs, and the AIs at-times-frustrating decision-making. If a player goes AI late in the game they might have a lot of resources and competently-scripted mages/armies for the AI to play around with which can slow things down enormously. I mean, take my assessment with a grain of salt, since I don't play  , but everything I've seen suggests this isn't too unusual. It tends to go much quicker if a player goes AI because they suffered a massively catastrophic turn and lost most of their military or mages, because then their neighbors can more confidently split up their armies or send out poorly-kitted minithugs to sweep through PD sooner. There's also the additional problem of dealing with underwater provinces; it's a pain in the rear end getting land-bound units under the waves in any real quantity, so even though most aquatic units suck, you can still get wrecked by attrition. Not sure if there's also still a penalty to non-aquatic units underwater, but if so, that means you'll also be dealing with a malus to...I think its movespeed and stamina recovery?
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Jan 25, 2017 09:35
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Call in ya boy Scabiel. ...actually, is there any sane way to get the Maker of Ruins to, ya know, make ruins? I was under the (possibly mistaken) perception that Doom Horrors don't really take to being ordered around and just disappear or something even if you can leash one.
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Jan 25, 2017 15:15
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A heartwarming story of friendly giants and the hordes of bloodsucking undead that carry the word of their divinity and the horrible WMD biological agents they've engineered.
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Jan 31, 2017 02:42
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The Dominion mechanics were so much more ridiculous in 3, as well. It was not unusual for newer players to take less than five dominion score in their build while trying to make room for a very ambitious strategy, only to die from Dominion loss in the first year because fewer than half of their temple checks were succeeding even before taking into account enemy dominion.
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Feb 1, 2017 22:20
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I ALSO do not play Dominions, but a couple of little bits of trivia to add are that Dominion candles are added to the province that generated them unless a check based on how much Dominion is already there says the candle should flow out to a surrounding province. The more candles of Dominion in a province, the more likely the newly-generated candle is to be moved into an adjacent province, where the check is repeated until all candles have settled. Again, this could have changed some from Dom3, but that's my understanding. There's also a hard cap on candles of Dominion in a province (about ten, I think? But don't quote me on that bit). As I was corrected earlier, Dom4's chance for a Temple check succeeding is also different from Dom3, where each level of innate Dominion gave a flat %10 chance for the temple check to succeed (which also means you could die on turn three or so if you had Dominion lower than four and bad luck). Apparently that's been boosted to be something like a %50 default chance of success with an extra %5 per level of Dominion in Dom4, so low-Dominion players aren't AS likely to be crushed by blood-sacrifice nations early on simply because they have no reserve of friendly candles. I believe, if memory serves, that a scout with holy levels (or possibly the spy trait?) can tell you what the enemy Dominion level in a province is, so if you see a remote temple in a blood-sac nation suddenly surrounded in maximum Dominion, you know poo poo's Going Down. Units with the Inquisitor trait can reduce enemy Dominion in a province, if I'm not mistaken, and units with the Heretic trait reduce ANYONE'S dominion in their province. I can't think of any strategies that explicitly use these mechanisms for Dominion control off the top of my head, but again, that could be lack of familiarity. Often units with Heretic also have Unrest or other malus-causing traits that make them useful for injecting into enemy provinces to piss people off, and some units with traits like Inquisitor also have Tax Collector or patrol bonuses that make them useful for strategies that min-max income (or for reducing unrest when blood hunting). All this means that you might already have such units on hand and they could help blunt the damage from neighboring Blood powers trying to Domkill you. Shady Amish Terror fucked around with this message at 15:44 on Feb 2, 2017 |
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Feb 2, 2017 15:42
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TravelLog posted:Out of curiosity, what can you Wish for? Unless it's been changed, there's simply a list of verbs that work (and supposedly Dom2 had more options, but it was trimmed down in the next two revisions). This butt-ugly page has what is probably the complete list: http://dominions-4.wikia.com/wiki/Wish E: A few notable things about Wish. Wish can summon almost any unit in the game, but I believe it cannot summon pretender chassis (this may have been possible in Dom2), and wishing for any flavor of Grigori (holy giants) gets you Grigorious the Grigori, a useless unit who will eventually disappear on his own and is described as 'answering the calls of wishful thinking'. It's actually a little odd, since the Grigori aren't necessarily even the most powerful units you could Wish up. Wish is incredibly powerful, and for certain builds can supplant parts of the research tree by allowing you to Wish for unique units and artifacts (powerful unique items at the top of the construction tree). Wish is also incredibly expensive at 100 astral pearls, so while it is potent if used correctly, it's not as game-breaking as it might appear (unless you find a discount magic site, in which case Wish can become an endless fount of resources and run away with the game all on its own). Most of the unique verbs you can wish for are useless, in typical Dominions fashion, and exist more for flavor. Wishing for a Doom Horror is a pretty bad idea overall because it may not be under your control and will randomly defect and disappear after a small number of turns anyways. Unless it has been changed, I THINK Wish can steal unique units and artefacts from elsewhere in the world, but don't quote me on that one. E2: Wishing is also one of the ways to decimate the world if you're feeling spiteful in late-game. Wish a few times for Armageddon and watch anybody who still relies on gold, troops, or human mages start tearing their hair out. Caveat: your armageddon-wisher should ideally be immortal/super-beefy, because they too can be smote by the angry hand of the End Of The World wish. If you're capable of performing this trick, I suspect it would single-handedly decide the game, as players go AI refusing to try to micro-manage damage mitigation and anyone left immediately beelines for your nation in a giant defensive pact. Shady Amish Terror fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Feb 8, 2017 |
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Feb 8, 2017 16:40
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Well, I don't actually play Dominions, so my opinions should be taken with a nice big bag of rock salt, but I had heard the argument before that there are better specialist units to wish for than Grigori and it had made sense to me at the time. Let me look at the mod inspector site real quick and see how that holds up. Hmm...alright, the Grigori are pretty close to the cream of the crop. There's a couple of other chassis that appear to make sense for SC's, and there's a couple of things you could try for better magic in a couple of schools, but I have to concede the Grigori are probably just about the top of the unit heap. Tartarians aren't especially appealing (they were more powerful/available in Dom2/Dom3, I think?), and the elemental royalty can probably be summoned directly if you're capable of getting to Wish. I do wonder, though, can you wish for God Vessels, the Queen of the City, or other niche application heros?
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Feb 8, 2017 17:15
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Ah, apologies for my mistake on Pretender chassis, I guess I'd mis-remembered that. I had also forgotten that LA R'lyeh doesn't exist anymore, so no more summoning extra-dimensional abominations as mini-horrors, which was probably one of the things you could summon to beat a Grigori in terms of what to wish for.
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Feb 8, 2017 17:26
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Oh! So they do. I must have misunderstood what I'd been told about them, then. Did they lose their insanity mechanic or something? That's like three things I was wrong about. I'm apparently very misinformed about the differences going into Dom4, sorry.
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Feb 8, 2017 17:59
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twig1919 posted:Edit: I just realized how badly I want a board game version of dominions that can be played in ~3 hours. That is a fascinating design puzzle you've put forth. Dominions as it stands only works because it's a computer game and a lot of the extraneous cruft is ignorable or handled by automated calculations, so you'd have to relegate a lot of that stuff to a limited subsystem or remove it entirely. Getting a game down to 3 hour play sessions as a goal would be ambitious. It would be, what, something like settlers of Catan and Risk? Maybe have a deck of random event cards (and you get to draw more each turn/ignore bad events if you have Luck scales)? Or possibly cut that. Maybe have a deck of lesser strategies and effects that you expend research or gems to draw from (pull a Turkeys! card, expend it in a combat move for an advantage)? Or possibly cut that. Maybe have a deck of magic sites that you can site-search to get a draw from? Or possibly cut that. It's probably not a good idea to track individual gem counts, so that would need to be simplified into either an abstraction based on your gem income per turn or some generic 'gem' pool you draw from. There's just so many subsystems and oddball strategies in Dominions that it's hard to know exactly what to cut it down to to fit the framing you propose. Shady Amish Terror fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Feb 12, 2017 |
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Feb 12, 2017 22:34
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I feel like liches were more important in one of the earlier Dominions iterations, but being all the way at the top of Enchantment does sort of put them into 'nice bonus' territory instead of 'critical strategy' territory. Actually undead in general may have been over-emphasized in earlier editions between Tartarians, their near-immunity to 'gently caress everyone' spells, Tartarians, the various Ermors, and Tartarians, but that may have also generally been from a lack of better options. E: Hey, Bane Lords still exist. Thugs aren't as meta-critical now as several years ago, though, it seems. Shady Amish Terror fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Feb 15, 2017 |
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Feb 15, 2017 18:30
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my dad posted:You forgot to mention the Tartarians, LA Ermor, and the Tartarians. Ah, yes, thank you.
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Feb 15, 2017 18:33
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RabidWeasel posted:Did Tartarians get done away with entirely or did they just get cheese proofed in some way (presumably by making their afflictions uncurable by any means?) They appear to still exist, but I think their insanity was curable before? Like, it's a little weird to dump gems into getting a random unit that may or may not be a commander and may or may not be feebleminded (apparently about a 1/16 chance of being a commander with magic?) and then may or may not have five or so levels of magic that are actually useful and will EVEN AFTER ALL OF THAT still spend about 1/5 turns knocking over your temples or attending funerals. They don't seem to be the most useless thing in the game by far (haha, wishing for an arena to appear, or trying to corral Doom Horrors, among many, many, MANY other things), but they seem shockingly unreliable for the research investment. Shady Amish Terror fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Feb 15, 2017 |
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Feb 15, 2017 19:25
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You could probably do a lot worse for 10 death gems? I mean, they're big undead things still. For the research costs and summoning time I feel like there's probably better uses of most peoples' time though (like skellyspam or attack magic). They're just not the reliably near-immune ten-gem panacea they were before which I guess puts them at about the level of most non-unique summonables, which is to say they have a niche but you're not guaranteed to see them like you were before.
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Feb 15, 2017 19:58
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Leperflesh posted:Ah OK. I wonder why they bother with a different attribute, then? Does Shattered Soul do something different than Insanity? Supposedly it DOES have a slightly different 'wrong command' list, if mutterings online are to be believed; it can cause them to shove over temples, but they won't kick labs. Jeb Bush 2012 posted:IIRC Shattered Soul was introduced in a Dominions 3 patch, before that you could get them 100% functional with GoH And yeah, I didn't realize it was patched in Dom3 if that was the case, I just knew that in some revision of the older engines Tartarians could be GoH (and, I think, Chalice'd) up to full functionality, which is when they were completely ridiculous at 10 death gems a pop or whatever.
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Feb 15, 2017 22:44
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You could maybe try to handwave it as the difference between durable constructions with rituals that you get to keep around and 'hey let's just animate whatever poo poo's laying around from centuries of ascendance wars oh look it fell apart after about twenty minutes, whoops', but I agree that for as much as the game loves its big goofy mythology, it's a curious inconsistency. Dominions doesn't make too many concessions to gameplay or user-friendliness, but I guess that's just one of them.
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Feb 16, 2017 22:24
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While the population starts the highest in LA, it's generally the premier point thematically for apocalyptic events, such as massive blood sacrifice rituals or insanity-spreading dominion or (in Dom3) blighted undead dominion turning the world to dust. Also it should be stated that the chronology of the Dominions world is a little muddled. EA is clearly followed by MA which is clearly followed by LA, but the Ascension Wars JUST KEEP HAPPENING. Half or more of the big-ticket summons are explicitly servants of the/a previous Pantokrator, and there's ways of calling on previously banished and defeated Pretender Gods among other powerful, sealed-away beings. In fact, there's no practical limit to how many you can get. The overall implication is that the world is in some hellish cycle of death and rebirth that keeps churning out new Gods who then disappear creating a power vacuum that everyone else rushes to fill over and over again. It's like some incredibly convoluted way of implying that every game of Dominions is canon, even the ones won by turkeys. Especially the ones won by turkeys.
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Feb 26, 2017 01:10
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Much of the flavor text provided by the games suggests that Pantokrators eventually feel the pull of something greater, elsewhere, and just sort of gently caress off, but that's definitely a plausible fate for them. I don't expect it's called the Eater of Gods for nothing. ...then again, Scabriel is called the Maker of Ruins and does approximately gently caress-all of that.
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Feb 26, 2017 01:58
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Their believers can pray them back to life, but you're absolutely right. Of course some of them are immortal and would have to be trapped outside their dominion for it to stick even that much. And of course, the quantity of 'enough' heavy cavalry varies a touch. Sure, some Pretenders are just weak old mages who know how to keep their health up and run a cult, but a dragon is no laughing matter for pikemen...nor a Sphinx, for that matter.
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Feb 27, 2017 00:33
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I posted the heat-plot someone made earlier, yeah. With attendant explanation:Shady Amish Terror posted: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?): The short version is that Dom3 was really sketchy for 'random' numbers, and I don't know whether Dom4 fixed it or not. E: I should add that while having better pseudo-random numbers would be a nice touch I wouldn't be surprised to learn was in Dom4, in practical terms it really doesn't matter that much. Even the extraordinarily deterministic and patterned output of the Dom3 pseudo-RNG was filtered through player inputs, so generally no one would ever be able to abuse it regardless. The only thing it negatively impacted was creating some situations the devs claimed were possible but were not, and generally those were such mathematically-improbable scenarios that they didn't functionally exist anyways. Shady Amish Terror fucked around with this message at 08:51 on Mar 2, 2017 |
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Mar 2, 2017 08:42
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Belatedly, re: Blood Chat, when speaking in the context of national strategies, Blood isn't necessary, but it's definitely one of the big end-game strategies for all of the reasons mentioned before and more. There are only going to be a few premier strategies of roughly equivalent power for the endgame in a game like Dominions, because while there's a glut of options they're not all created equal. Blood's power and versatility put it way, way up on that list, and it helps that blood can, in a pinch, be broken into by pretty much any nation that has the desire to, simply by doing lovely virgin-hunting with lovely commanders until you've finally got enough blood sacrifices to empower somebody. Blood also seems to be proportionally slightly more powerful than it already was in Dominions 3 because a couple of the other late-game strategies worth a drat were centered around cheap and/or nigh-invulnerable super-combatants, and super-combatants appear to be a less viable strategy in Dom4 in general what with the resistance changes. Basically to summarize, Blood is potent, and it's not the ONLY end-game strategy or necessarily the strongest one, it's just that you can probably count the most efficient end-game strategic goals on one hand.
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Mar 6, 2017 02:55
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wiegieman posted:It probably turns out better if you're attacking with a giant army of vampires. Until a massive wave of counter-preaching temporarily eliminates your dominion prior to temple checks re-establishing it, apparently.
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Mar 12, 2017 17:30
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Re: Blood sites, my knowledge is, once again, mostly from Dom3, but it doesn't sound like much has changed with regards to blood sites. Blood has FAR fewer magical sites than other disciplines, they're much more rare, they're most commonly level 0 sites that start revealed, and most excel at being mediocre. They're usually things like slave caravans or bloodsport colosseums which give you a trickle of gold or blood slaves, which are at least positive effects albeit not very strong ones. Searching for blood sites might make a little more sense in a game where the number of sites has been cranked up (like this one), simply because there's a slightly better chance of finding one of the better sites. Looking it up on the mod viewer, there ARE several discount sites for Blood; Discount sites are often game-changing, because they effectively add to your gem income in their field relative to your existing gem income/gem use. A %10 discount site may not sound like much, but the difference between 10 vampires and 11 vampires in a battle could change the course of a war, and the effect is multiplied the more you invest in that field of magic (since you can often summon discounted magical creatures to then cast discounted magical searching spells to gain even MORE gems, or in the case of blood, you can more rapidly produce quality blood-hunters). A discount site offering %20 or more discount (of which Blood apparently has a few!) is a game-winning McGuffin that should be protected at all costs and exploited to its maximum potential. E: Noodling around in the mod viewer, it looks like Blood only has about as many magical sites as Holy, which are fairly rare...unless you add in Thrones, in which case even Holy, amusingly, has more magic sites than Blood. E2: Wow, holy sites are loving weird, it's a shame that you don't typically see Holy or Blood sites in a game. There's Holy sites that reveal score graphs, and one which...lets you summon flying monkeys. Huh. E3: Haha, holy poo poo. H3 site 'The Records of Mankind', reveals ALL SCORE GRAPHS, and allows you to recruit Lore Masters, 300 gold mages with 3 magic picks from all fields except Holy and a whopping 26 research power each. Shady Amish Terror fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Mar 13, 2017 |
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Mar 13, 2017 21:14
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Unless I'm terribly mistaken, that's a reasonable rate for quite good researchers, gives you a nice chance of breaking into any paths you're still missing, and is a nice cherry on the cake of having a free Eyes of God. I mean, I guess what's amusing to me is that it's a really good holy site, but who's going around site-searching with H3 priests? Or priests at all, for that matter?
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Mar 14, 2017 03:12
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It doesn't help that it looks like there's a trend of holy sites that provide small reductions to unrest, or minor improvements to order. You can sometimes spot a province that has a hidden blood or death site polluting its unrest or scales, but how often are you going to even have the opportunity to notice that 'oh, this province naturally loses unrest quicker'? Even the minor clues that can sometimes tell you something's up with a province's magic sites don't seem to help for Holy.
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Mar 14, 2017 04:06
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The cost is huge even if you find a site with every casting (and even in a game like this, you probably won't). In terms of gem income, it's not remotely worth it. You could gamble on finding a discount site somewhere though, which would probably pay off.
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Mar 14, 2017 07:13
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Pretty good turn. I'll also be amused if Holy site-searching turns up anything; as rare as they are, there ARE some pretty nice Holy sites.
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Mar 20, 2017 11:06
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That's, uh. That's a pretty nice province there. Be a shame if something happened to it.
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Mar 21, 2017 03:03
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Yeah, most wide mid-to-lategame AoEs are a potential counter to skelespam; as seen, they can gum up the works significantly through sheer mass otherwise. While the above listed counters are all valid, the IDEAL solutions are the ones that take out the mages doing the casting, since the skeletons are just free chaffe and you'll constantly be swimming upstream against them until the casters stop. Vampire flight negates Earthquake, if I'm not mistaken, but anything else that blasts the entire battlefield or can at least reach into the back of the enemy formation is worth considering. The mod viewer lists Banishment as having a base range of 20, but I don't know how that translates into the usual battle encounter. It does get a nice hefty boost of +5 range per additional holy level (in addition to its great AoE of 4 that goes up by TWO per additional holy level), so if you've got ready access to H2 or even H3 priests, Banishment should clear wide swaths of skeletons and vampires.
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Mar 26, 2017 06:45
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It's going to be...interesting seeing what the other players have in store, in comparison. Looking forward to that, and also to the Demon Gate possibly hilariously ruining the world (I don't know if it does that, but I can dream).
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Mar 27, 2017 05:06
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Three great powers colliding soon; might be cool. Still love that even as the playerbase dwindles, no one has attained the level of that early Dominion spike yet.
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Mar 28, 2017 03:25
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It's entirely possible to just straight win a two-front war against equally-matched powers due to the massive problem-space of the game, but diplomacy really is one of the most powerful weapons in Dominions.
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Mar 28, 2017 20:53
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If there's one major obvious power, everyone who's competent will probably gang up on them (see also: the attempted world-Domkill earlier and how that went). If there's two major powers left, they'll eat any obviously weak neighbors before throwing against each other while all the little powers go AI or try to play kingmaker against the person eating them. If there's only and exactly three obvious major powers left, they'll probably all shuffle their feet for a good long while trying to make plans on how best to kill one of their neighbors slowly and one quickly and then try to get one of their neighbors to agree on that plan. In a situation where only one person has access to the graphs at any given time, it can be difficult to tell who's the biggest threat or easiest target at a glance, which is why scouting and good game knowledge is essential. Also remember I don't play this game, so take my second-hand observations with a grain of salt.
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Mar 28, 2017 23:01
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sebmojo posted:Didn't TheDemon hold off two foes for like thirty turns in one of his games? If I'm not mistaken it was one of the LP games, and I THINK they later went on to win it after everyone else had exhausted their resources and/or patience, or at least outlasted several of the other players. The two players were numerically slightly superior and had TheDemon pinched in, but ended up not being able to overcome better strategy and movement traps at the chokepoints.
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Mar 29, 2017 01:15
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The Throne of the Pantokrator is a lonely one. Maybe 's part of why they keep loving off.
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Apr 2, 2017 01:49
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