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The saddest thing is that no one even needs an army to capture that province any more. A scout could attack it and win - since there are no leaders left the sole remaining Barbarian will simply run off the field as soon as the battle starts.
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Sep 27, 2016 00:16
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Errr, Libluini's video is Part 16, not Turn 16 - while each covers a single turn, Libluini skipped the first few turns. This video is for Early Winter of Year 2, as opposed to the middle of Summer here. Also, you apparently decide to claim the Throne in a few turns after all. You can see how closely I'm following the videos, since I just noticed. 
Lord Koth fucked around with this message at 00:26 on Oct 12, 2016 |
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Oct 12, 2016 00:22
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Among Dominions players, you basically have two groups. Those willing to take some Misfortune for the extra points, and those who never take even a single level in Misfortune, EVER - generally because they got horribly screwed by it in some early game. Ultimately it's a gamble, as you're potentially risking a single extremely rare horrible event, or a string of moderately bad events all at once, in exchange for more tangible and always reliable boosts to something or another. Note that the specific event which removes every single gem you have also requires heavy Drain scales, which is one reason you don't take heavy levels in both as anyone - most relevant for MA Ulm or the few other nations that can take Drain scales due to Drain-immune researchers, as most other nations generally don't want to take Drain anyways as it slows down their research. As for the gems, in a game with normal sites 4 pearls off a single throne is actually a pretty big deal, typically worth taking the single point hit to your scales to grab as soon as possible. Here, with far higher site frequency, it's not quite as valuable, though still pretty significant.
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Oct 12, 2016 01:40
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Really, if your summon spell costs well more than 100 whatever period, then you're probably better off just wishing for it. There is precisely one summonable unit(s) in the game that you can't get via Wish, and that singular one uses blood slaves. It's still ludicrously expensive, but at least with blood slaves you can actually bring in far more of them than you can any other gem type, so it's not quite as bad. Those are the Grigori set of unique commanders, incidentally. Trying to Wish for a Grigori will get you an utterly worthless commander named Grigorius the Grigori. At 30 hp, 0 leadership, and immobile, it's a giant joke. Anything else, with Seraphs probably being the most common choice if you're actually wishing for a commander, is perfectly fine to Wish for.
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Oct 23, 2016 02:52
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The Best Thing is wishing for Doom Horrors. You'll even get one at it'll be under your control! With like a 30% chance per turn of going hostile and attacking you. Not that people haven't figured out ways to get around this and keep the ludicrous magic paths some of them have.
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Oct 23, 2016 21:53
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It also became far harder to domkill people a few patches ago, due to them changing the formula used for whether a temple check generates a candle or not. It's really hard to domkill people any more due to those changes, other than by blood sac. Currently the formula for whether a temple check generates a candle is 50% + (5% x Dom). It used to be 10% x Dom. Lord Koth fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Oct 30, 2016 |
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Oct 30, 2016 00:00
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Shady Amish Terror posted:
Only takes building four for the first dom score boost (since you start with the needed fifth already - in your capitol), which might have been messing up your math.
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Oct 30, 2016 22:25
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Out of idle curiosity, what has Ragha been doing so far, if any of the players commenting in this thread have run into them at this point in the game? From experience they tend to be monstrously powerful with large money/resource boosts due to their primary limiting factor normally being just how expensive their units and temples are. Decent sized groups of N9(+some other minor/major bless) Zhayedan basically murder everything ever this early in the game, and their non-sacred recruitable cavalry - Saravan Guard with their 20 prot, shields, lances and composite bows - are hardly slouches either.
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Nov 4, 2016 06:20
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Pretty sure Lemuria's dominion is just as bad as MA Ermor, it's just that Ermor also actually has a fairly good army, both in their chaff and sacreds. Lemuria... doesn't. At least not to the same extent.
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Nov 4, 2016 21:44
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Nah, aside from summoning in a bunch of large demonic locusts with Heretic, it doesn't look like Blood has any means via spells to reduce candles. They're not stealthy and it's not a particularly good attack spell either as they're pretty lovely units. It does cost 88 slaves though, so maybe that's what you're thinking of? Alternatively, you might be thinking of Enchanted Forests - which is up at Conj 9 and 90 N gems.
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Nov 11, 2016 22:36
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Heh, Hell Power communion. To elaborate on How are u's description, what actually makes it so nasty is that communion masters proliferate all personal target spells onto all the slaves too. Usually it's going to be things like boosted fatigue reduction and regeneration, but in this case Hell Power happens to be a personal spell as well. So instead of just the master having a chance per turn of drawing a horror, the bats ended up with 9 chances per turn, until some started dying, with each having a chance of drawing in a Horror. As for Ragha, Throne of the Sun is a good throne overall, but depending on his scales it may very well inconvenience him as well. Ragha has a weird mechanic where they have temperature sensitive recruits (3 hot mages & a hot sacred, 3 cold mages & a cold sacred) that are only recruitable dependent on the temperature of the province you're recruiting them in. Temperature changes naturally over the year dependent on the seasons, but the Hot/Cold scales of your pretender influence this. Generally Ragha is going to go with a slight H preference, because their H sacreds are REALLY loving GOOD, and the C sacreds really aren't that great, but C does get the arguably better mages (H still gets good mages, the C mage selections are just really good). So H1 will shift the temperature bands so that their H units are recruitable for more of the year, while still leaving a small gap in winter for recruiting C mages. The Throne of the Sun increases his H scale, which may very well lock him from never getting a C province within his candles without usage of spells to tweak it. The other thing that makes the Throne of the Sun not quite as valuable to them as others, and something that contributes to the above issue, is that Ragha really wants to build temples if they can. Ragha's temples cost DOUBLE what most other nations' temples do, but that's because they also produce F gems (capping at I believe 10 additional F gem income), so while the throne has good F income, Ragha already has a really good source of that gem. The extra cost is generally not an issue in Mo Money games, so the encouragement to build temples also means their Dominion gets pushed stronger, meaning they push their now (likely) H2 scales into their provinces significantly faster, possibly making it hard to even keep forts on the edge of your nation still producing C units for long.
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Nov 14, 2016 23:26
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Yeah, that throne really wasn't a good one for Man to be attacking, especially given how he's been doing his army compositions. Defender having priority meant that with an Annunaki of the Sky as the throne leader, Arrow Fend and Fog Warriors were going up before Man could do much about it, and the main enemy troops being Spring Hawks means there's no way to stop them from engaging your troops on the first turn because they can't be grounded with Storm. You really want a melee focused army along with mass electrical resistance for that throne, not any sort of ranged army. And spells that give mass electrical resistance for the army are way up the research trees.
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Nov 23, 2016 21:13
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Tossing a single thug with massive lightning resist into the throne probably causes the Annunaki to start spamming Phantasmal Army actually, instead of thunder strikes. Still doable given a Lore Warden's base 13 MR, but that's a LOT of unbreakable troops to cut through, and at least some damage is probably going to sneak through, so you're potentially looking at an item for fatigue reduction, an item to increase MR, and possibly items to add regen and morale as well, since morale route is still a thing, and the unit you actually need to break is the Annunaki which has far higher morale than you do.
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Nov 23, 2016 23:08
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By default I'm (almost, due to Dominions code being Dominions code) certain the game cannot generate a cap and a throne on the same province. If someone sufficiently mods it for that to potentially happen, who the hell knows? There have been MP instances where someone has ended up with only like 2 connections out of their cap though, one to a dead end and the other to a level 2 throne. In cases like that... well, sucks to be that player. This is why people running games normally give the map at least a cursory look, to make sure cap points can't spawn like that.
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Nov 29, 2016 04:17
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Wishing for Armageddon is the better of those two options if you're just trying to drag everyone else down with you. Astral Corruption is more to gently caress over non-blood nations and give you the advantage in general - which may not be terribly useful if they're already stomping you into the ground. On the other hand, blowing up the population of the entire world, and thus dropping income into the gutter, is going to affect the rest of the game whether you survive or not.
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Dec 1, 2016 20:45
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Zereth posted:My guess is that they gave orders to send seven guys there for some reason last turn, then something before movement phase spawned the shadows. Alternatively he was just trying to get them killed to get rid of them. No real reason Pan needs to be recruiting generic commanders anyways, even in mo money games.
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Dec 14, 2016 03:01
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How are u posted:Yeah like others have said: Pangaea's Minotaurs and Centaurs are elite troops. They've got great HP, good armor, good to decent combat stats (Minotaurs are not good, but Berserk), and are just so much worse to fight than Humans that it's not even funny. Also, Pangaea's build is extremely Scale-heavy, so he can pump out as many of his almost entirely non-Sacred troop roster as possible. This scares me and makes me want to be his friend, because we have lovely income and wouldn't be able to survive the tide of beast-men if Pangaea decided to 1 on 1 war us. You didn't show a picture, but I'm guessing the front line was made up of those Dryad Hoplites, wasn't it? Which means decently armored troops with shields that anything non-mindless has to pass a morale check to even attack in melee due to having Awe (2). Every round. Which makes them an insanely effective tar pit for minotaurs and cataphracts to come around the flanks.
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Dec 21, 2016 01:01
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I'd say it depends on whether you're talking about troops or commanders. There IS a troop version of vampires, and while they do maintain some advantages, mainly immortality and invulnerability, there are a number of different types of demons that can fit many different battlefield roles, and some (namely Storm Demons and Demon Knights) are just flat out vicious regardless of situation. So I'd generally rate demonic troops above Vampire Spawn. For commanders, immortality combined with B7 being reasonable compared to when some of the unique demon commanders become means the edge arguably lies with Vampire Lords there. Most of the demon commanders also only have 1 magic path, which gives the versatility edge to vampires as well. Finally, every single demon commander is unique, which means there is both a limited number of them you can summon in the first place, and they are vulnerable to another nation summoning them out from under you. The actual Demon Lords themselves are extremely nasty, but they are both incredibly expensive, and research-wise they're B9.
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Dec 29, 2016 23:42
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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. It's a more money, more resources game, so not incredibly unusual. In a normal game most nations probably don't want to do that.
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Jan 11, 2017 03:23
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Vorpal Cat posted:It seems like Mo' Money would really weaken nations that rely on powerful cap only units. You get the same number of them, but you get more then twice the amount of everything else so as a percentage of you army anything cap only is much lower then in a normal game. Meanwhile nations with powerful recruit anywhere scareds get even more terrifying. This WOULD seem to track, except that the list of "recruit anywhere" sacreds is extremely small, and of that small group they're generally either trash (ex. Khlysts) or cheap enough that nations don't really have trouble recruiting large numbers of them regardless (ex. Jags and Eagles). There are really probably less than a handful of "recruit anywhere" sacreds that really benefit from this, and they're generally not attached to particularly bless-heavy nations in the first place (ex. Knights of the Chalice). Meanwhile, nations like LA Ragha, EA Niefelheim, and MA Ys, with enormously expensive but incredibly powerful cap-only sacred units, can now recruit extremely large numbers of them. These are nations that wouldn't really benefit in a normal game even if you removed the cap-only tag on their sacreds, simply because there are only so many 120+ gp troops you can afford regardless of other limitations. In More Money games though, they can now basically just set their cap to making the maximum amount each turn and call it a day. LA Ragha in particular also has rather good non-sacred heavy cavalry that also heavily benefits from being able to afford hordes of them. Lord Koth fucked around with this message at 20:52 on Jan 11, 2017 |
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Jan 11, 2017 20:49
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Going by who has what available, either Caelum or Pangaea probably has the best idea of the current map. Both have flying scouts, which means they can cover vast distances quickly. Pangaea's in particular is forest-recruit, which means you don't even need to take turns away from mage recruitment. It's not uncommon for late-game Pangaea to have scouts revealing most of the world. As for this game, I'm actually surprised Bogarus is as large as it is, unless they formed a coalition against someone else and managed to reap most of the rewards. Bogarus has okay troops but nothing particularly special, and while they do have good magic paths, it still takes time to get the research to really use it. Especially compared to what Ragha can field, or the absolute hordes of blessed troops Mictlan can. Though Mictlan may be slightly distracted and gobbling up the ocean provinces, since with Xibalba out there's no one else who can really contest him there. edit: Actually, I'd forgotten Jomon in regards to underwater. Though with how thoroughly Caelum has been mauling them above water, I'm somewhat surprised Mictlan hasn't picked off their underwater stuff. Especially since they went AI a while ago. wiegieman posted:Bogarus has powerful mages with varied paths, so they're viewed as one of the bigger late game threats. Very specifically, they have at least some access to everything except Water and Nature, though their Earth and Death access is relatively poo poo - only a single level on a single mage each, neither of which can get randoms. The real reason people don't like them in the late game is because they have mages with both Blood and Astral, which means easy Horror spamming. People tend to not like nations with easy access to Horror spam. Lord Koth fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Jan 12, 2017 |
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Jan 12, 2017 01:49
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sullat posted:Bogarus has decent cheap mages and with a more money game hopefully has a lot more of them than otherwise. He can communion up air, astral, blood, death and fire and lay waste once he hits 5 in many fields, and with his master of names getting a research bonus, that shouldn't take too long. His demonologists and alchemists may never handle huge death/earth rituals, but on the battlefield they should be able to handle most stuff with a communion. Of course, but it still takes time to get that up and running. Bogarus doesn't have recruit anywhere mages, and thus needs to both take territory and get additional forts up first. And both Ragha and Mictlan have easy access to communions and good attack magic as well. It's certainly one of Bogarus' strong points, but it's generally not as much of a big deal in the early game as the late. Zereth posted:The what? Bogarus has a summon that adds a chance for an extra event to a province - per bird. With good luck scales, this can result in large gains once it's up and running - though still RNG based.
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Jan 14, 2017 03:20
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Yeah, I mean at this point it's a problem, because they've grown incredibly large and have now had years to amass forts, mages and firebirds. I was more referring to them getting that large in the first place, since for the first two or so years any of their neighbors should have been able to trample them, before they really brought their advantages online, given who those neighbors are.Shady Amish Terror posted:
...What? Pretty sure the whole "they act like Misfortune scales for others" was a myth, and Luck scales are Luck scales regardless of who gains an advantage from them..
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Jan 14, 2017 16:01
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Donkringel posted:I am surprised Ulm is out in this style of game. With their Rangers and the massive bonus I would think they could easily make an impressive army early. In addition with their national vampire summon they should have been beefy by beginning of Y2. Does anyone know what happened to them? LA Ulm has a tendency to get dogpiled, which may have happened. Like Bogarus they've got innate S/B casters, which means people wouldn't particularly like them even disregarding Sanguine Heritage. Unlike Bogarus, their mages are also recruit anywhere, which means people are even more likely to want to knock them out fast.
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Jan 18, 2017 20:32
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Ragha must have literally started as far away from you as he possibly could have this game because according to those graphs he hasn't actually been doing that badly, and yet and your neighbor Caelum still haven't seen a single sign of them. Also, glancing at the player list, all I can begrudgingly note is that the same player AIed a few turns back in another game where he wasn't doing particularly badly - and also playing a relatively powerful nation. How are u posted:
I'm going to be incredibly amused if when you attack him he opens up with Fog Warriors or Mass Flight. Judging by what he's cast so far it doesn't look likely, but that research has to be going somewhere. On that note, with how easy he's had it Bogarus has probably just had a bunch of his mages spamming firebirds instead of doing research, since nothing was particularly pressing for him. Lord Koth fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Jan 20, 2017 |
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Jan 20, 2017 01:39
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Xerophyte posted:Armies with tiny mans in them, most mages and blood slaves are inherently quite weak to earthquakes. That strike cost How are u 18 gems and two mages, in return for about a turn's worth of recruitment. A good return on investment but not fantastic in this case -- as he said, one or two more casts would've killed significantly more and possibly caused a rout. It helps against both. Earthquake generally hits for 8 armor piercing damage, with some units getting hit for significantly more, while Rain of Stones hits for 14 normal, but it has a fairly decent chance of hitting the head and is bludgeoning damage. So the mages of certain nations tend to shrug off Earthquake especially - it's just Man's mages aren't particularly hardy. Not touching the ground, either via flying or floating, also completely negates Earthquake - and a certain cheap item known as a Ring of Levitation exists. edit: Defense rolls are also allowed to avoid damage, which is why both spells technically hitting the entire battlefield doesn't result in uniform results to everything, even aside from damage/protection rolls. Lord Koth fucked around with this message at 10:20 on Jan 22, 2017 |
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Jan 22, 2017 10:16
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Honestly, that's another reason (hell, it's the main reason for many nations) people tend not to like Burden of Time - especially if it's cast early it tends to shut down blood economies before they can really grow out of control. This isn't so relevant in LA with its generally high population provinces all over, but in EA and MA 5k+* pop. provinces aren't necessarily all over the place, and losing the lower pop. ones before you can really set up operations, along with having the amount of time you can hunt in the higher pop. ones significantly cut, really hurts those strategies. *: 5k is the magic number because trying to blood hunt provinces below that population amount takes a massive hit in effectiveness.
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Jan 24, 2017 18:01
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PurpleXVI posted:What's the effect of Arcane Nexus? Any time any player (including yourself) uses gems for casting spells or forging, you get some percentage of the gems spent (half according to the description, but I'm somewhat suspicious of that. SP testing never seems to net me anywhere near the number of gems I think I should be getting considering how much the AI loves to cast random summon rituals). Not applicable to blood slaves and Astral Pearls. You still get some gems each turn even if no rituals were cast or items forged. It's incredibly powerful and it along with Astral Corruption are probably regarded as the absolute best globals overall.
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Jan 31, 2017 21:12
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Honestly, at this point Man's player should have noticed that How are u has been heavily blood saccing and is starting to extensively use vampires - and been yelling in diplo channels about those two things to every other player. Heavy blood saccing combined with vampire hordes are one of those things that it's not too hard to get a dogpile going against if you actually make an effort to try and get one together. No way to tell if they haven't done so though, or if they have simply been unwisely ignored.
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Jan 31, 2017 21:38
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It's not so much the vampires alone, as it is that Gath also has blood saccing. Either on their own are regarded as extremely dangerous, but now Gath is using both. Heavy blood saccing means vampires can be used far more offensively than normal. Even more than the vampire hordes, it's the BLOOD SACCING that should be getting a posse together, the vampires are just the cherry on top. Bird economy can get you neat stuff, but you still need to turn it into other things to really use the rewards. Vampires + blood saccing means "Well, I'm tossing a horde of vampires at you... Oh, you killed them? They're hitting you again next turn too. And the next." Seriously, go look at that map - Man has lost dominion control of provinces in his cap circle, let alone ones further afield. Even without how insanely good vampires are in that situation, having someone else's dominion intruding that much is dangerous for any number of reasons.
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Feb 1, 2017 04:43
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How are u posted:
Actually, unlike the elemental royalty and treelords, I'm pretty sure the unique demon summons will cheerfully leave you if someone else happens to cast the spell and there are none left unsummoned. So there is a slight downside to those four separate groups of unique summonable demons in Blood.
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Feb 7, 2017 18:01
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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?) I believe the only way to cure them is via the global Gift of Health, which obviously only one nation can have. It's also high up in a completely different magic type than tartarians. Further, as far as I can tell they're summoned as troops, so you have to use one of the spells to turn them into leaders if you want them to really do much. They're also just less powerful in general, due to the changes in resistances/immunities. I mean, it's still an incredibly beefy combatant, with multiple magic paths, that only costs 10 D gems to summon, but they're nowhere near unstoppable.
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Feb 15, 2017 19:29
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Eater of the Dead really isn't a wise choice for a number of reasons, but the comedy option of empowering it into Astral, then letting it eat a huge number of corpses before teleporting it somewhere very far away would be fun. Let someone else deal with the rampaging out-of-control monstrosity. Something of a lesser version of the God Vessels EA Agartha can release.
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Feb 16, 2017 01:32
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Yeah, that lovely Vine Men event has nothing to do with Enchanted Forests. It's just a relatively rare bad event that can occur in forest provinces with positive Growth scales. Probably the shittiest part of it is the 10% popkill attached to it, as it's still going to really hurt the province even if the PD resists the attack.
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Feb 19, 2017 06:43
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PurpleXVI posted:Wow, I thought Enchanted Forests would just put out minor harassing swarms, but goddamn, that's a pretty nasty group. Definitely enough to overwhelm most PD and often probably more than that. Pan gets cheap temples, so if they are it's their own drat fault. In a mo money game anyone should have carpeted their provinces with temples by this point, let alone a nation with discounted ones.
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Feb 23, 2017 06:03
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Incredibly cheap, small size so more can be fit in a single area, and also have better than average precision - which means they hit their target more than most crossbows (human ones generally have 10). They're pretty good.
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Feb 25, 2017 07:41
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Admittedly, regardless of its original reason for being there, it should be preparing to invade you due to, well, Arcane Nexus. Also, Man has apparently still not figured out that it doesn't take much effort for them to forge some Staffs of Storms and seriously mitigate the vampire issue. Or, hell, skip the staff and just flat out cast Storm first turn, given the only thing they've needed it for is defensive battles. LA Man has innate A2s and is going to get a decent number of A3s, all they need to do is empower an A3 once and they can do either of the above. The gems should not be a problem at this point in a max site game for a nation with Air on every single one of their mages.
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Mar 2, 2017 15:17
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The real answer is Bogarus puts up Astral Corruption, then starts launching horrors at Gath's provinces to shut down his slave collection, but they seem to be busy doing something of their own.
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Mar 3, 2017 07:43
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Honestly, most nations, if they have the time and resources to do so, should consider bootstrapping themselves into Blood. Even with zero initial access, it's possible to just set bunches of random indy commanders/scouts to blood hunt - which they do absolutely terribly, but you will get some success - until you get enough slaves to empower someone. Even if you don't really feel like going after the actual Blood school spells, there are a fair number of really good magic items that need cross-Blood paths to forge. Blood Stones (misc. Con 6 item; gives +1E) are a good example.
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Mar 6, 2017 01:04
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 03:08 |
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Curse of Blood is the ritual spell that summons Vampire Lords, which is why it's being cast so much. Bowl of Blood is the sitesearch spell for Blood sites, and it's honestly not cast much because there are normally much better things to be doing with the mages - specifically there are not that many Blood sites to begin with, and many start revealed anyways, so it's not a terribly efficient thing to be wasting mage turns and slaves on. There ARE some hidden Blood sites that are good, but as opposed to (especially in a More Magic game) generally finding at least 1 site every 2-3 casts with other sitesearch spells, and many times more (currently have 4 Fire sites in a single province in one game), you might find 1 or 2 across your whole territory. ^efb I'll note that Augury is the name for both the Air and Fire sitesearch spells though. Lord Koth fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Mar 13, 2017 |
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Mar 13, 2017 17:54
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