|
Now for the inevitable teeth-gnashing phase when one of your opponents comes up with something frustratingly simple but difficult to counter, be it massive globals, flying raiders, or just some form of attack you haven't planned for. One of those opponents COULD be your ally and using said trick against the person you're dogpiling, of course, which gives you more information for preparing your sudden but inevitable betrayal. Dominions.
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2017 05:47
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 18:23 |
|
|
Better yet, combine it with Bad Draft rules. Games will take forever when some people are going to have nations so terrible they can't order an attack on a neighboring territory until turn three or four, but the individual turns WILL go very fast!
|
|
#
¿
Apr 8, 2017 10:52
|
|
|
Reasons to have your nation become everyone's target of choice: Massive blood sac. Vampire swarms. Massive blood sac AND vampire swarms (+2). Massive demon swarms. Owning more than one global. Owning four out of five globals (+3). Owning one of the economics engines (birds, Astral Nexus, Wish engine, etc) Owning a powerful magic discount site. Owning multiple powerful magic discount sites. Being the largest nation. Being the richest nation. Being the nation with the most Dominion. Being an infamous player. Casting one of the 'gently caress you' globals. There are other reasons, but those are some of the relevant ones I can think of this game. It's kind of amusing because ramc qualifies for maybe four of those conditions and howareu qualifies for...nearly all of them, which should again demonstrate that Diplomacy is the most powerful school of magic in Dominions. Howareu is in a VERY good position as of this turn, provided they don't get backstabbed by everyone at once and lose patience fighting an all-fronts war.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 11, 2017 06:36
|
|
|
Well, I wasn't entirely wrong on the demons thing either. Summoning more demons is one of the incredibly obvious things to do with powerful blood mage demons, and lo and behold.  This could definitely be...interesting. I can think of a few ways this could shake out (movement traps with stealth preaching to decimate vampire armies, scorched earth tactics, teleporting a massive murderball), but none of them feel like the right answer, so I'm really eager to see how this goes.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2017 04:28
|
|
|
Libluini posted:Another highlight: I apologize to Bogarus for accidentally marching some clowns into one of this provinces, then send him 10 air gems as a gesture of good will and called them back. Pffffffttthhahahahahahaha. I mean, it's not quite cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, but that is a hilarious cycle of rudeness.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2017 15:04
|
|
|
Tulip posted:The assault on Fas Dir feels like peak dominions. Everything went nuts. If it's not, it's pretty close, yeah. No battle plan survives contact with the enemy and all that. I also appreciate the way that a Dominions LP kind of turns into a slog mirroring the original game, but it's sort of hilarious seeing how many army orders are being glibly glossed over every turn. I, again, don't play myself, but it's great reading these interesting, fascinating stories and knowing that for each eagerly-awaited update, there was a turn where every player involved had to script a few dozen armies against whatever resistance they were seeing, issue move orders, cast several spells, craft several items, assign gear to thugs and mages and commanders, individually move dozens of scouts, review the orders for each of possibly hundreds of mages and priests and scouts and commanders, coordinate all of that with an overarching national strategy...and pray to god you didn't accidentally stealth-move a key strategic unit instead of moving them with the army, or you didn't accidentally forget to give a key mage gems, or you didn't misclick your doom-stack into sure and certain death, or you didn't stampede a bunch of living units through terrain that can't support them, or you didn't see that tiny 1-pixel river that means your army's path is going to get cut off when winter ends, or you didn't script the wrong spell, or you didn't screw up and overspend your gems or gold loving up a future strategy, or you didn't just send immortal units into enemy dominion, et cetera.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 13, 2017 06:51
|
|
|
My understanding is that if you're too much of a git, the community will remember it and you will find your life to be hell in future Dominions games. However, a little bit of backstabbing and asshattery seems to be par for the course, especially if there's no formal NAP in effect. Non-Aggression Pacts, along with trade deals, are considered sacrosanct by most Dominions players, although it's also still pretty normal to have spies running around in your allies' country and to be preparing to turbohellfuck someone the TURN the NAP ends. Without an NAP, a coalition is basically accepting the possibility of falling into infighting at any given moment, and has a non-zero chance to at some point just because that means everyone in the coalition is gearing up to body each other at the first opportunity. Usually simple greed will be enough to keep a coalition together until its target(s) are destroyed simply because that's the advantageous goal that makes people form coalitions in the first place, and most players want to gather all the resources they can before committing against their other neighbors. If a coalition of three or four people is taking the world but doesn't have any NAPs, you can bet they're jockeying between one another to decide who's next on the chopping block.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 16, 2017 16:55
|
|
|
A lot of the players have shown fatigue from dealing with the increased resources of a Mo Money game, so that's probably a factor. Being very active diplomatically is also an important factor, I think. Whether or not How are u is the most dangerous nation entering the endgame is a hard determination to make, and he certainly wasn't the largest, but domspam+vampires+Nexus should have been one of the world's biggest Kick Me signs, IN ADDITION to several other red flags that the other players made note of. You don't want to give a nation the time to fully leverage some of the most powerful tools in the entire game.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 17, 2017 11:06
|
|
|
I personally know that mages with high death magic will often make good situational use of the array of damaging, debilitating, and summoning spells available to them off-script, as long as you have the right research for them to have those spells, and I know that mages like to buff big crowds of nearby friendlies, even when the buffs are incredibly useless or highly situational. Mages seem to prefer spamming damage spells at enemies in range (up to and including touch spells, if given the opportunity), but then again, mages off-script seem to sometimes do bewildering things too, like buffing themselves for melee combat (though I wouldn't be surprised if that last one got patched out or at least made less common somewhere along the way). If there's a simple rule of thumb, I'd love to hear it.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2017 05:24
|
|
|
Zaodai posted:If you get rid of all the worthless stuff, something else ends up being worthless on the new scale. Unless you leave 1 unit and 1 spell, there's going to be something optimal and something not. ...that's not how rock, paper, scissors works. Like, I understand what you're saying, some things will tend in most systems to be better choices than others in most situations, but you're phrasing it in the most ridiculously extreme hyperbole possible. At the very least, it's a bit extreme to say that something will always by necessity be 'worthless'. It's possible (and encouraged) to have a game system where there are no strategies without a niche, but Dominions adds a lot of stuff that's just there for charming flavor. This increases the breadth of Dominions' problem-space without increasing its depth, which understandably irks some people, particularly since it violates an old strategy-game rule of thumb that you should remove or automate all no-brainer decisions. Dominions is large enough that it would be difficult to perfectly balance, perhaps impossible, but it's weird to have this knee-jerk reaction because it makes it sound like you're arguing that there's no reason to consider streamlining the game. The argument writ large makes it sound like no game can ever be streamlined or improved. You can argue that Dominions doesn't need that kind of trimming because it has its own niche as the game with a million forgettable options that someday might prove clutch exactly once ever, but it's weird to just say 'the more options you remove the more you make objectively worthless', which seems to be the thrust of your statement. I mean, if you reduced everything to a coinflip between two equal options, 'heads' will not be inherently better than 'tails'.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 25, 2017 20:41
|
|
|
Zaodai posted:Some of the useful spells are useful because they counter the useless poo poo, thus making them useless. If you get rid of what is being countered, then the counter itself goes down in value. ...if a spell is only 'useful' because it counters something no one uses, then both are useless, because the use case for that spell never comes up. If a spell counters something that has a rare niche, then congrats, you have a small amount of tactical interplay and neither is completely useless, just niche or suboptimal, and the situation in which they're the right choice rarely comes up, but they're still not useless. Truly worthless stuff in Dominions would be like the large number of different independent army units that are just anomalously a couple points worse than others of the same cost, or the various low-level spells that don't even have a use on turn 1, much less turn 20. You either want a very different game than Dominions (this is fine), or I think perhaps we're all talking past each other and you're not really understanding what some of us are saying with regards to Dominions' problem-space.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 25, 2017 21:00
|
|
|
Libluini posted:And when it finally happened, it was so shocking the Imperium of Man fell and the Eye of Terror engulfed the entire galaxy. 1235620 better patch these loving void units i swear to the emperor
|
|
#
¿
Apr 26, 2017 17:41
|
|
|
I would say it's ironic that you're suffering because your opponents hoarding gems instead of aggressively spending them like you normally probably should, but maybe that's why they're still not somehow all ganging up on you? Maybe? I guess? I kind of feel like the micromanagement needs of a Mo Money game have completely skewed how the endgame is operating here. It's starting to look like everyone has just tons and tons of stuff, and no desire (or just plain not enough time) to really dig into scripting and casting and orders. That, and/or everybody is working on completely ridiculous impractical superweapons to win the war instead, which I suppose is also not out of the question in Dominions.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2017 20:26
|
|
|
I'm fairly happy with the choice of Horror Seeds as how are u's impractical secret weapon, if they're ever going to actually do anything ever at all, this is probably the time what with dozens of castings over many, many turns. ...granted, I'm not expecting anything, but treating a Mo Money game as an opportunity for science feels appropriate to me.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 30, 2017 22:00
|
|
|
Or wishes for it, yeah; I think part of the flavor for artifacts is that they're so powerful they can't be completely destroyed and are effectively immortal themselves. As for Second Sun, I suppose it makes sense that it doesn't really do much to Dominions vampires, given they can do their thing out in the sunlight normally with no real issue. I don't think there's any units in Dominions that have problems with operating in daylight actually; I'm pretty sure darkness affinity is almost entirely governed by the Dark Vision trait which mostly just reduces or removes maluses from fighting in the dark, and a trait that a very few demons and other rare units have that gives a bonus to fighting in Darkness. Looking it up, the trait in question appears to be Dark Power. I don't think there's any equivalent malus to fighting in the light, outside of maybe some Dark Power units being lackluster in base stats.
|
|
#
¿
May 2, 2017 01:30
|
|
|
I don't know if 'simpler' is exactly the word I'd use. I guess the problem space is slightly shallower, because you've got less magery going on, but much wider, because now you're having to deal with a bunch of dudes in formations and the UI for commanding armies is...generally accepted as one of the game's weaker points. Again, I haven't even touched the game since Dom3, but I suspect there's specific nations with specific strategies that are easier ways to learn the basics of the game than others. Maybe running a bless nation? That way you've just got one big hammer and all the world is nails, and it teaches you the basics of formations and scripting since you'll need to manage blessing everyone at the start of the fight. E: Yeah, I'd forgotten about how complex magic gets later on. EA or MA is probably better. Shady Amish Terror fucked around with this message at 01:48 on May 3, 2017 |
|
#
¿
May 3, 2017 01:45
|
|
|
Water nations as a whole could almost be described as one of those cool things in Dominions that exists primarily for fluff reasons but doesn't interact with the gameplay well. I had a big stream-of-consciousness (ha) rant about how to fix water nations, but it just boils down to (ha) 'you can't, easily'. The closest thing I could think of would be if you could mod some underwater commanders to innately grant amulet of the fish effects to units under their command (which I'm also not sure if that's even possible, since I don't think you have access to that much control in Dominions modding), but even that doesn't rectify the relative dearth of water nations or units or sites or spells, or how annoying it is to assault the water from the land.
|
|
#
¿
May 3, 2017 11:08
|
|
|
While going into a conflict with a good plan from a position of power gives you heavy advantage, yes, comebacks and turnarounds are hardly unheard of. In the LP's alone, there's several examples of smaller powers winning against larger, wealthier foes. Granted, this doesn't always translate into winning the game (since you usually then have several OTHER stronger powers to fight), but winning a fight as the underdog is always satisfying, and the number of options available in Dominions open up the opportunities for it to occur. I don't play Dom 4 (and only dabbled in 3) so I can't comment on THE META as it stands, admittedly.
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2017 16:28
|
|
|
Hahaha, that random event is just perfection; it doesn't get much more Dominions than randomly having some army-shuffling peon get transmogrified into a horrible but mostly useless monster for no particular reason. Also, good to see the horror seeds doing work, even if that work is 'wait what gently caress'. Eagerly looking forward to someone spitecasting Astral Corruption and the whole drat world being sieged by recursive horror attacks.
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2017 23:08
|
|
|
Eagerly awaiting horror seeding your own vampire army entering the standard Dominions meta.
|
|
#
¿
May 13, 2017 01:45
|
|
|
They should have, if I'm reading things right, since they were the last to hold the field and were created from horror seeding. Also, I suspect that once an immortal unit dies and unleashes its horror, all that's left are the horror marks, but I wouldn't put it past Dominions to have a durable Horror Seed effect. However, I also wouldn't be surprised if the situation hasn't come up much and no one knows for sure yet, so this game could see some horror science being done. Aren't horror seeded units supposed to start horror marking other units in their province over time and transforming them into horrors? You'd figure there should be some truly heinous levels of horror marks going around with all the seeds that have been planted over so many turns, but it doesn't look all that visible yet.
|
|
#
¿
May 13, 2017 11:32
|
|
|
Turns out that if you write a book, you get to say all sorts of self-aggrandizing poo poo.  I can still appreciate The Art of War for being a fairly early treatise on war doctrine and strategy, but uh, that link is pretty awesome, and so many of those quotes feel...unreasonably relevant to Dominions strategy.
|
|
#
¿
May 14, 2017 02:04
|
|
|
yurtcradled posted:At what point did you run out of old testament names for vampire lords? ...that can happen? How are u posted:We, on the other hand, have been summoning demons for a dozen turns, summoning Vampire Lords for like 60 turns [Ed: Though speaking of, this is my favorite footnote by far. Seriously, being allowed to keep Arcane Nexus up for, what, dozens of turns now(?!) while blood-sacrificing and spamming vampires is just silly. The game might be called Dominions, but it's all about that Diplomancy.
|
|
#
¿
May 21, 2017 04:52
|
|
this is loving nuts]
|
Yeah, they're static values, and for most units they're still zilch. ...after spending a few minutes poring through the mod viewer, literally the only summonable units I could find that innately have magic paths but aren't commanders (aside the majority of Tartarian Titans, the famous example) are the angelic hosts that come with some of the mass angelic summons at the top of the conjurations tree; these units, like Ophan, are mostly just H2 and H3 holy priests, though a few also have a smattering of low magic paths. There are probably a couple more units in the world that have magic but don't arrive as commanders, but I'd be willing to bet those are either from uncommon magic sites or are national summons or some other such rare edge case. Joe Dirt the Line Chaff isn't secretly going to know any magic. Maybe Void Gate units like Vastness need to be commanderized? The mod viewer doesn't make that case very clear.
|
|
#
¿
May 25, 2017 15:20
|
|
|
Sloober posted:I don't recall the name since its been a bit but yeah the orby collection critters from r'lyehs gate get magic when commanderized Vastness, yeah, they have astral. I just wasn't sure if they were summoned in as units or commanders.
|
|
#
¿
May 25, 2017 19:23
|
|
|
So wrong, and yet so right. They'll probably lose the war, but that right there is moral victory. Granted, that huge, intricate magical machine would function a little better if it weren't being screwed over by Darkness effects, but there's still no stopping unscripted mages from blowing it all up in the
|
|
#
¿
Jun 4, 2017 02:31
|
|
|
Corbeau posted:
I'm so glad this post ended the page, and hopefully it will get to be the title of the thread for whatever poor sap decides to make the next LP.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 4, 2017 08:38
|
|
The real winners are us, who didn't have to play this game at all.
|
Broken Box posted:Have there ever been a multiplayer Doms game where the world was not reduced to a hosed to death pile of burning poo poo by the end of it? I imagine it would take an "environmentalist" game where certain global/provincial damaging spells are banned, but even then the world would still be plagued with blood sacrifice, vampires, demons and horrors from the void. It's one of the cool thematic elements of the game, with the general byline that 'war between deities would be HORRIFIC', but it's entirely possible for a game to reach a winning state before things get too worked over, especially with the introduction of the Thrones system. Prior to Thrones, in earlier iterations of the game, the only way to win was to be the last Pretender standing, so instead of having the possibility of a few swift Throne caps cementing their ascendancy, any game that actually made it to an endgame state would virtually guarantee at least one if not several losing Pretenders Wishing for Armageddon, diseasing and aging the whole world at an incredible pace, tainting the very fabric of magic with blood corruption so that horrors start attacking absolutely any sign of magic anywhere, blotting out the sun with Utterdark, sacrificing thousands to grease the wheels of demon-summoning war industries, etc. In the background material, several factions are explicitly opposed to global devastation in some sense, valuing either the land or its people as core cultural ideas, but that doesn't stop most of them from loving it all up in practice regardless because as people keep pointing out, when the war is on to become God, virtually any measure is defensible since if you gain omnipotence, you could just fix things how you please. In many cases, 'fixing' things means slaughtering the rest of the living to rule over a kingdom of the dead, rending everyone's sanity, or choking civilization under a wave of murderous plant life, prior to feeling some astral tug to an unknown elsewhere and leaving behind your broken kingdom for the cycle to begin anew. It kind of really loving sucks to be a dirt farmer nobody in the world of Dominions.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 8, 2017 05:49
|
|
|
Well...my understanding is that the AI will practice some discretion with gem use and will actually go off script if it feels that ordered gem use is unwarranted (to prevent a single scout triggering a doomstack into spending hundreds of gems on buffs), but the horror spam seems to be enough to overwhelm that threshold pretty reliably. If the doomstack's orders were altered in such a way that the horrors efficiently got wrecked in a couple of turns before the full might of the doomstack activates, then that would save a lot of gems, but then your orders are probably worse for fighting another doomstack when that attack eventually happens. Being beyond the pants-making GBS threads threshold for mages also seems to mean they will pour out gems like water if allowed to go entirely off-script. Again, I don't play, but I can't think of any strategy that would guarantee conserving gems for the big fight without also making your army worse at fighting a big fight. I think at best you'd have to rely on some one-shot spells and hope that those are good enough for fighting the main army (...ignoring the fact that the majority of accurate one-hit-wonder spells are touch range and thus terrible ideas for ever using for anything). I could just be overlooking something, but I can't think of an approach that reliably ensures the doomstack can deal with both sizes of threat with the correct amount of force.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 19, 2017 09:39
|
|
|
Yeah, I hadn't thought of cutting the mages apart so that you can have some in reserve for the normal-phase battle, but as you point out, it wouldn't work for a castle fight. ...also there's the fact that it's some wacky gambit where you have to anticipate the exact turn the important double-fight is occurring without your opponent realizing that you know and/or figuring out your strategy, unless you're moving two separate flight-stacks in and out in alternation to avoid the off-turn, which also means committing extra forces to said wonky gambit and virtually guaranteeing that someone's not going to be present for the big throwdown. That seems a little bit dicey. Shady Amish Terror fucked around with this message at 14:16 on Jun 19, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Jun 19, 2017 14:13
|
|
|
I am so, so glad that Horror seed is doing a couple of things here and there. I can't imagine it being the right call in most any game where you're NOT mysteriously sitting on Nexus unchallenged for tens of turns, but it's kind of hilarious here.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 10, 2017 22:32
|
|
|
I mean, all of those things are true, but so is the fact that somewhere in his territory some grouchy mage hides under a table, eating nothing without a taster checking it first, afraid to so much as look out a window because the massive magic economy of their God rests squarely on their shoulders and somehow vengeance wasn't terrible and swift. Granted, they've been living like this for over a year now(?), somehow, so maybe they've just become the sort of person who flips off murderous royalty and smacks barking hellhounds on the nose.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 16, 2017 03:12
|
|
|
the Orb of Zot posted:I'm expecting Gath to win the game and then somehow lose anyways. Well, if you look at what the lore implies about the nature of the ascension wars...
|
|
#
¿
Jul 30, 2017 22:50
|
|
|
death panels Congrats, we've found it, peak Dominions politics. death panels
|
|
#
¿
Aug 3, 2017 19:42
|
|
|
The short answer is that it's one of Christian God's many obscure nicknames, and probably the one that speaks most directly to their all-powerful rule of the world. Shady Amish Terror fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Aug 5, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Aug 5, 2017 21:39
|
|
|
TheDemon posted:The implication is they get lured out into the void and eaten by horrors. At least that's what the existence and fluff for the Eater of Gods implies. I don't think the fluff text goes into great detail on the matter anywhere, so there could well be more to it than JUST that, but it's not what the ascendance wars are concerned with, so who knows.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 6, 2017 03:22
|
|
|
It is utterly incredible when you phrase it that way.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 8, 2017 01:20
|
|
|
Wannabe godlings loving up the world in their pursuit of power at the expense of literally everything up to and including the stability of reality and the lives of their own worshippers is so compellingly batshit that there are dozens of entire tabletop game systems based around it. Dominions just does one of the better jobs in terms of making a setting that's a massive clusterfuck of different ideologies and myths that, inevitably, gently caress the world up in their attempts to strangle out the competition, and there's only a tiny handful of videogames that even come close to simulating the level of chaos and insanity that Dominions does. I certainly can't think of any other videogames where you can play as a sentient Fundamental Word of Reality (Flaming Glyph, I think is the chassis name), who summons Cthonic horrors from the void in the hopes of assassinating Baba Yaga. Because that's a plausible series of events in Dominions.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 12, 2017 06:51
|
|
|
Bug Squash posted:I thought it was generally the play to just stack them all in the cap? I have heard some people allege there's an event limit, but I thought that was generally considered false. I can almost guarantee that the way Dominions works there's a point of diminishing returns per province, and some nerd out there is sitting on an optimization function solved for that inflection point.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 30, 2017 09:42
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 18:23 |
|
|
The practical opposite of a Mo Money game would probably be a Bad Draft game played on the worst possible magic settings with no one having innate blood access. Unfortunately Bad Draft is a huge pain in the rear end to set up last I knew (you literally have to craft a custom mod with everyone's terrible nations at the end of the draft), and then playing it would be a special brand of Fun as virtually no one has any access to anything and has to stump it on terrible traditional units until someone lucks into actual magic access and probably just wins the game from snowballing.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 4, 2017 22:10
|
|