Mo Money, Mo Problems - Let's Play Dominions 4!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Mo Money, Mo Problems - Let's Play Dominions 4!

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

Ramc posted:

Barbarians will berserk and thus not rout at all too.

That's strictly the lords, that one barbarian just rolled morale like a complete psychopath. That one'll leave if you do a scout ping, though.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2016 14:01

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 02:51

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

Asehujiko posted:

What do you need to be playing as to even get to unlocking BoT and having enough gems for it in 14 turns?

Quite a lot of factions can get to Thaum 5 by turn 14 provided they have good indie luck and a god somewhat built to do it (amazons, lizard shamans, and Amber Clan mages are great researchers without the full suite of expensive infrastructure, for example); the gems are more of a matter of good event luck / a piss easy Throne of Death underwater right by you / people sending you theirs to chip into a historic evil endeavour etc.

# ¿ Oct 21, 2016 00:04

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

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.

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.

Yeah I have no idea why you can't wish for the grigori, they're actually not as good as a lot of other stuff nowadays (insert jpg of any 19+ path DLC faction hero), but it's a feature for some reason.

# ¿ Oct 23, 2016 11:04

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

RoboChrist 9000 posted:

Cant you wish for them by wishing via their unit ID rather than their name? I believe that works?

Fraid not.

# ¿ Oct 23, 2016 21:03

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

5 temples per extra point up to ten, yep.

# ¿ Oct 30, 2016 22:06

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

ousire posted:

since the topic of Dominion score is relevant right now, what's generally considered a good / safe score to take for your pretender? Is it that How R U's score is legitimately low for a Pretender, or normally would be okay and he just the great luck of being right next to a domkiller neighbor?

Back in the day, 6 or 7 was about safe, now anything 4 or over is probably fine so long as you only want 4 sacreds per turn. Pretty rare a couple of points of dom makes that much difference to your build, though, until the really high levels.

# ¿ Nov 4, 2016 16:27

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

Spoggerific posted:

Are there any viable strategies that revolve around taking awful scales and then spreading them to your opponents' provinces too?

That is something people like MA Ermor, sometimes MA Sceleria, LA Rlyeh and LA Lemuria do quite often. On the other hand if you start pushing dominion hard, people will come kick your temples over if they can, and if they can't, then all you're doing is spoiling their relatively good territory before you take it over.

# ¿ Nov 4, 2016 16:35

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

Ramc posted:

Is close in spirit.

(But better)

# ¿ Nov 22, 2016 01:08

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

Gridlocked posted:

Buy it.

I'm going to improve it first I think but thank you.

# ¿ Nov 22, 2016 11:26

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

Nope, s'all dark blue candles.

# ¿ Nov 23, 2016 17:59

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

ChickenWing posted:

fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck spring hawks goddamn

Flaming Arrows goes through Ethereality and Mistform and is the primo way for MA Man to deal with that throne, but it probably? the roughest one in the game.

# ¿ Nov 23, 2016 18:43

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

How are u posted:

There's also the level 3 Throne defense that is ~Spring Hawks~ plus an E and A Titan instead of an Annunaki of the Sky. You can probably guess what spell the Titan enjoys casting.

Yeah this is the one I was thinking of as definite contender for hardest. There's another one which is Shades plus Fire Snakes, which is theoretically difficult due to the paralysation + fire AoE attacks?, but can end up being very simple if all the shades set themselves on fire, which is pretty classic Dominions right there.

# ¿ Nov 23, 2016 19:21

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

tombom posted:

Do you have a link to it? I vaguely remember reading it and them getting very annoyed when people suggested it was not the perfect strategy.

A timeless masterpiece

Highlight:

"I [then] do absolutely nothing for the first 10-20 turns and save up my gold
until I have at least 4,000 on hand. Then I queue up 20 Niefel Giants and 1
Niefel Jarl leader."

# ¿ Nov 29, 2016 20:10

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

Applebee123 posted:

Would people consider [copying Bogus et al's orders] cheating?

Yes, obviously, which is why they took it out of the game.

# ¿ Dec 9, 2016 23:25

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

smdh that people are forgetting the ~lore~ for the moderately tall people of Gath who mostly aren't allowed to forge iron due to their despotic overlords not wanting to pass on the riddle of steel.

# ¿ Dec 21, 2016 22:09

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

Leperflesh posted:

How do demons compare to vampires?

Just a completely different kettle of fish.

Vamps are very hard to kill with non-magical weapons, quite a lot of demons aren't.

Vamps can destroy whole armies with spells like Plague, which most demons can't (the non-national demons that can tend to be unique)

Vamps have immortality, I don't think there's any demon that does.

But demons often have ways to deal with lifeless targets better than vamps through elemental damage, are cheaper and easier in the first instance to mass before Blood 7, plus they have a great early buff called Blood Lust which buffs their strength (and often their innate ranged attacks as a result).

# ¿ Dec 29, 2016 23:14

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

Just as an FYI the plague of locusts spell doesn't actually work right, because only units who are commanders can make use of the heretic tag unless this was silently fixed last patch (making it a pretty bad way to spend 111% of a vampire lord's cost!)

# ¿ Jan 1, 2017 22:00

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

Ardeem posted:

Please tell me the name of that spell is "mote."

It's actually 'Fate of Oedipus' which is pretty metal in a hellenic way.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2017 12:21

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

Lord Koth posted:

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.

RoS is also one of the very few spells that Actually Hits The Whole Battlefield (it also has the same 10% chance of hitting you on the head as most attacks, so spending gems on helmets instead of body armour for human mages is the sign of a true mug). Furthermore it is not resisted by defence.

Earthquake is actually one of the least consistent damage spells; even if your enemy's mages all had 1hp and no armour, the fact it only hits half the battlefield and is resistible by defence (which is extremely rare!) means that you're probably going to kill more like 40% of those mages per cast rather than the 100% an RoS would get for 1/3 the gem cost.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2017 12:28

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

sullat posted:

E4 is easier to get than A4E1 or whatever RoS is, though.

RoS is a 1 gem E3A1 spell which means any E1A1 mage can cast it by spending a gem to Summon Earthpower and 2 to cast it from E1+1A1.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2017 17:04

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

There isn't, no.

IME Berytos, LA Atlantis, and LA Marignon start by the coast if they can but beyond that it's hard to get a read on it.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2017 19:04

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

goatface posted:

Do cave nations always get caves.by default?

I think at least EA and MA Agartha do yep but stuff like Abysia and Xibalba which can be a cave nation and gets bonuses from it will not necessarily start on one on a randomly-generated map (also this goes out of the window if you're playing on a premade map which doesn't have caves on it)

# ¿ Jan 25, 2017 13:38

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

ChickenWing posted:

Alternatively, do drafts and don't be bad at drafting/modding/not going AI

The fun part of a draft is picking stuff, and then some poor fucker actually has to hand craft 100g of PD per 10 points and so on which is not enjoyable for them.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2017 17:58

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

Cerebral Bore posted:

Wouldn't that just either lead to some weird snail race sitution where everybody is trying to do badly for the first year or not affect things at all depeding on whether the stuff you can get in the draft is better than the advantages conferred by a strong early expansion?

EDIT: This is, of course, leaving aside the question of whether Dom4 even allows you to add in new units to a nation after the game has started.

I'm pretty sure you could kludge a way to do it in-game through events, but you would need to do the draft for worst -> best performer units pregame.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2017 23:09

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

Zernach posted:

Looking at liches, they seem pretty meh when how are u already has vampire lords. D4 doesn't look much when compared to D3B3 and flying on the vampires.

Yeah but vamp lords cost slaves whereas liches cost D gems (which you probably have a lot of if you're on a DB nation after searching provinces and quite probably owning a couple of capitals that might have D income). If you've got the gems, there aren't that many better ways to spend them than accruing a big nasty pile of immortal Plague/gigantic horde of skeletons/life after death/bone grinding etc. etc. casters.

# ¿ Feb 15, 2017 00:57

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

Cerebral Bore posted:

The problem with Liches is esssentially that if you're a big D nation you're probably going to have recruitable D4 casters (or at least D3 and enough D income to empower one to D4), so why would you need them?

You never need em but they're immortal and so it's an investment that just keeps paying off!

# ¿ Feb 15, 2017 16:50

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

wiegieman posted:

Tartarians now have a incurable insanity unique to them, but they're still insanely powerful.

They always had Shattered Soul, and no, Insanity is not cureable even with Gift of Health up.

# ¿ Feb 15, 2017 22:05

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

If you want to win with hordes of mediocre-but-buffed units and mages it involves way way more micromanagement than a handful of SCs with a couple of spells and Attack orders.

I'm sure I'm not alone as a dominions player in thinking quite a lot of the appeal of a handful of flying thugs going about wrecking the place comes from a midgame spent optimising squad placements and casting orders for your mages which is insanely tedious but important.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2017 14:15

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

I ride bikes all day posted:

All of his blood hunters are H2. That's nasty potentials for Dom push, if I understand the mechanics right.

Not really since they don't blood sac.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2017 18:13

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

Loxbourne posted:

Is Blood the go-to power source, or are people just focusing on it because Gath is a nation that can use it well? Whenever Dominions comes up I hear a lot about blood slaves and sacrifices, to the point where it sounds like all other magic is secondary and you have a serious handicap if you pick a non-blood nation.

Blood is strong as hell late because it combines the ability to do all kinds of stuff in one tree, and the gem-equivalent can be harvested in the order of hundreds per turn by anyone who tries - normally a really gem-wealthy lategame power manages about 20-30 in most other paths tops, including capital sites.

Like with a bit of research you have:

- A way to make immortal units that are good as hell (vampires)

- Battlefield summons

- A nuke that makes assassinating blood mages a pain in the rear end, that any blood mage can cast on T1 of an assassination attempt and which never misses, instantly killing most living targets. To compound this there's no lifeless assassins without making an item that involves using blood magic to forge, and blood hunted provinces are also usually heavily patrolled because blood hunting causes unrest, and unrest makes you less likely to find slaves, so assassinations in general are less likely to happen.

- All kinds of remote attacks that do egregiously bad stuff (assassination attempts/horror attacks/unrest/disease/depopulation)

- A way to make mages probably die if they try to cast magic, including any attempt to dispel it (Astral Corruption - AC also costs quite a lot of slaves at base casting cost, which means you need a huge amount of pearls to even try to dispel it)

- Various unit buffs and debuffs

- A fort building spell that nobody uses often but they could

- High quality mages of all kinds of paths

No other tree but Blood really has that kind of efficiency in terms of getting a bit of everything from a single tree. The only thing that you can't do with Blood research that other trees can do is forge items.

Blood sacrifice is a whole other thing that causes a really disproportionate amount of "temple checks" relative to how difficult it is to do - once a faction gets to a certain point, there is basically no way to reverse the damage if you don't have blood sacrifice and better priests, and the world will pretty quickly come under the control of the saccing pretender unless the thrones get rushed.

# ¿ Mar 5, 2017 23:21

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

Leperflesh posted:

50 Magister Arcanes is... not easy to deal with.

*laughs while scripting rain of stones on 2 mages*

# ¿ Mar 19, 2017 23:17

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

OK but the point is that the dryad is going to set themselves on fire. It literally doesn't matter if the bane lord ever hits her, that isn't the intended source of damage.

# ¿ Mar 22, 2017 21:51

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

Veryslightlymad posted:

Dominions 27 will have a pop-up notice that says "Really sneak this unit when attacking with rest of stack?"

# ¿ Apr 2, 2017 03:28

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

Flavius Belisarius posted:

Alright, it's time. I actually have owned this game for a while but the interface is so clunky I haven't gotten into it.

How should I set up my first game, having no experience in the series?

You as a land faction somewhat near the bottom of the list (that's where most of the strongest ones are) on Streamlands with 5 normal AIs as random land factions, standard rules but first to 4 throne points so you dont have to take over the whole map.

jBrereton fucked around with this message at 01:20 on May 3, 2017

# ¿ May 3, 2017 01:17

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

AmishSpecialForces posted:

Is there a guide somewhere for the best strats to craft boosters/summon dudes to get higher levels in a path?

http://www.moddb.com/games/dominions-4-thrones-of-ascensions/forum/thread/dom4-magic-path-booster-guide-by-telos

# ¿ May 3, 2017 14:12

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

Hiveminded posted:

There are some higher-end commanders and summons that autocast spells like that to units under their command, aren't there? It would just be a matter of putting appropriate #copystats entries on existing UW commanders, I'd think.

No.

There is no #airbreathing command, and no commanders give it, either. I'm pretty sure #req_targmnr only applies to commanders, too, so you can't say cast a global which uses a #transform shape to give triton units a little water bubble and make them amphibious while it's up (I will experiment with this later though)

# ¿ May 3, 2017 16:55

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

Leperflesh posted:

Which you'd never ever rely on because if the water nation dispels that global or it gets replaced, whoops every airbreather currently underwater dies.

Don't bother with modding in the opposite global because it'd be equally dumb.

It's good to have some jeopardy!

# ¿ May 3, 2017 17:53

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

Applebee123 posted:

One way to turn the game, is if you are only a few thrones from victory, to empty out every mage from your forts abandoning research and rush those thrones. Hopefully by the time your opponents find out it would take them 5-6 turns to get their mages to the thrones if they wanted to do the same.

Suddenly having 3 armies of 20 mages spamming aoe armor piercing/neutralizing spells/skeletons/elementals etc can turn alot of fights in your favor.

Obviously a high risk strategy as you can lose a tonne of mages to rain of stones/earthquake/battlefield damage enchantments and so on. In addition you fall behind on research if you dont win quickly. The trick is to try and catch someone unprepared who doesn't have the research to handle mass mages as thats not what they were expecting to fight.

This can also happen in the mid game, i.e its turn 50, you need 5 thrones to win and have 2. A neighbour of yours AIs and you claim a throne 3 provinces deep in their lands. You can then rush the top two players who are much stronger than you but have their troops on another front and still have most of their mages in labs researching, claiming a throne in each of their provinces. You can go all in on those fights too, spending all your gems on random chaff, handing out gems to mages just to reduce their fatigue and let them cast a few more evocations in the big important battles.

One thing never to forget is the existence of Bishop Fish as a way to take thrones! Only takes a shambler skin to get them on land, which you can forge if you can summon them.

# ¿ May 12, 2017 19:52

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

Ramc posted:

lmao

# ¿ May 22, 2017 09:44

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 02:51

jBrereton: May 30, 2013; Grimey Drawer

The game is currently 66% off due to the Steam sale. You might like it and it's basically free.

# ¿ Jun 22, 2017 23:13

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