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 Hello friends, welcome to another Let’s Play of the incredible game Dominions 4! I am How are u and I have been playing Dominions 4 (and before that Dominions 3) for several years now, though I do not consider myself an expert by any means. This LP will be an account of my experience in a multiplayer game taking place within the SA Dominions 4 community. There is a very solid and fun group of goons who regularly play Dom4, and I believe all but one of the players in this game come from our community. I encourage the other players in this game to chime in with their perspectives and thoughts! That said, this is still an active and ongoing game! I would ask the other players to please refrain from posting spoilers! This is an LP of the game Mo Money Mo Problems 2, and it takes place in the Late Age. My goal is to post 2 or 3 updates a week, but that is always subject to change. What is Dominions 4? Dominions 4 is the King of Games, the Pinnacle of 4x strategy in the Grandest of Traditions. In reality it is a game where you slam pixel men into each other in gruesome, low-rez battles, and in which you research and utilize all sorts of magic spells with which to murder them in increasingly impressive ways. Here are a few ways that members of the SA Dom4 community have described this magnificent game: Baudin posted:Imagine a Total War game, but with magic and without the ability to control your units or real nation management or any semblance of balance whatsoever.   Roland Jones posted:For those unfamiliar with Dominions, it's a turn-based strategy game about gods fighting each other and quite frequently utterly ruining the world in the process.   ChickenWing posted:Suffice it to say that Dominions is a turn-based strategy game that shoehorns pretty much every recognizable belief system in the world into the guise of a fantasy nation and then attempts to settle the question of whether Jesus or Thor would win in a barfight.   TheDemon posted:Dominions is the best game ever because it is a cross between an old-school 4x and a fantasy adventure game, with lore based on real-world mythology, that has delivered literal years of multiplayer entertainment. Expect a game that takes cues from Master of Magic, space 4Xs like Master of Orion 2 and Stars!, or a tabletop RPG. Don't expect Fantasy Rome: Total War.   In my own words I’d say that Dominions 4 is a pretty unique strategy game in that it simply does not get old. I’ve put more than 1000 hours(!) into Dominions 4 according to Steam and I still look forward to joining new games and finding new ways to dick over my friends. It is A Good Game. What is this LP? As I said above, this is a LP of a multiplayer game of Dominions 4. Dominions LPs traditionally operate on a Turn Delay, meaning that the turn reports that you read in this LP are -not- happening in real time. You will not be able to suggest strategies or much influence the course of the game because everything you read will have happened months ago. Usually Dom4 LPs start with a 20-30 turn delay between a given posted turn and the actual turn of the active game. For this LP we are starting with a 75(!) turn delay. Why 75 turns? Well, I chose 75 turns for two reasons: 1) I wanted to make sure that I would get to the end-game phase of the game so that you wouldn’t get an LP where I was defeated on turn 30, and 2) This game is going to be -long-, for it is a “Mo Money” style game of Dominions 4. What is a “Mo Money” game, you may ask? Well, “Mo Money” refers to a game where several of the initial game settings are turned up to 11. Specifically, Mo Money means that Income, Resources, and Supplies have been turned up to 300% of normal values, the Magic Site frequency level has been set to 75% (for context the default site frequency in the Late Age is 35%), and Research Speed has been set to the very slowest setting. Essentially these settings mean that everything is turbo-charged, allowing players to field armies of multiple hundreds where in a default game they’d be able to field several score. The increased magic gem income means that high level, end game summons can be used generously, and that niche spells that may not be particularly gem efficient can be used without a large opportunity cost penalty. The decreased Research speed means that magic comes online later in the game, and that there are more opportunities for massive armies to clash face to face before devastating, army destroying magic can be brought to bear. Mo Money games are also, as I mentioned, long. Every province contains a castle to be sieged, and by the end-game every player is fielding massive, deadly armies of mages and high level summons. The first Mo Money Mo Problems game got to turn 138 (incredibly long for a game of Dom4) before it choked and died from game-breaking bugs. So, actually, starting at turn 75 may well be starting from the half-way point of this game! The Players: Mo Money Mo Problems 2 takes place in the Late Age, and starts with 11 Nations (Nation – Player): Gath, Last of the Giants – How are u Bogarus, Age of Heroes – Morrow Pangaea, New Era – AfroSquirrel Ulm, Black Forest – Naksu Xibalba, Return of the Zotz – ILoveYou Ragha, Dual Kingdom – MF_James Man, Tower of Chelms – Ubaten Mictlan, Blood and Rain – Tekma Patala, Reign of the Nagas – Atlanton Jomon, Human Daimyos – Griffen Caelum, Return of the Raptors – Libluini Gameplay Mechanics: I am writing this LP with the assumption that the reader has a very basic understanding of the Dominions 4 game mechanics. I make some effort to explain things as we go along, but I don’t go into so much detail that somebody who has never even heard of the game will understand everything with 100% clarity. However, I have cribbed a bunch of really Helpful and Good game mechanics primers from Baudin’s LP. I would strongly suggest that any reader without a basic understanding of how Dom4 plays click through these links. They’re not super long nor esoteric, and they’ll really help you to have a better idea of what’s going on in the game! Pretender Design Workshop by fool_of_sound Explanation of the different Ages of the game by fool_of_sound. Magic Discussion 1 by Nuclearmonkee Magic Discussion 2 by fool_of_sound Magic Discussion 3 by Samog Dominions 4 links: Dominions 4 thread in Games. ChickenWing’s Dom4 LP (Archives) Baudin’s Dom4 LP Roland Jones’ Dom4 LP  Bonus Have you ever wanted two LPs for the price of one? Well, friend, you are in luck because somebody else is LPing this very game! Libluini, playing the nation of Caelum, has been making a youtube VLP of this Mo Money Mo Problems game. At the end of each turn report I will include a link to his video of the same turn from his perspective. Wow, how cool! Thread Art!    Preid  Ramc  Araganzar  Ramc Contents: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 95 96 How are u fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Sep 5, 2017 |
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Sep 18, 2016 20:32
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Nation Overview The nation we are playing is Gath, Last of the Giants. Gath is the Late Age successor nation to Ashdod of the Middle Age and Hinnom of the Early Age. These nations are all based off of an amalgamation of Semitic, Biblical, Hebrew, and a bunch of Assyrian and Levantine myths. The nations are often referred to as “Giant Jews”, but personally I think that’s kind of an unfairly reductive descriptor that doesn’t do the nations justice at all. The strongest national themes are definitely Semitic and Biblical. The Nephilim of Biblical myth are the core of the national identity. In the Early Age, Hinnom was a bloodthirsty nation of divinely descended giants, mighty men with six fingers on their hands and horns on their heads who were cannibals and used wicked Blood Magic. In the Middle Age many of the pureblooded giants died off, and their slightly lesser offspring, the Rephaim, turn to necromancy, Death Magic, and ancestor worship to try and regain past glory. Finally, in the Late Age, the Age we are playing, the remnant civilization of Gath clings to the memory of the Nephilim but is really mainly a nation of men. Some of the lesser descendants of the giants remain and make up the ruling elite of Gath. Blood Magic has been rekindled in Gath, and it is a wicked society full of human sacrifice, necromancy, and demonic summoning. Here’s the description the game gives you when you select Gath:  I’m going to go ahead and do an overview of Gath’s troops, commanders, and mages. This is mainly for the purpose of letting you the reader see some of the fun unit descriptions, because we won’t be using like 90% of the troops and like 25% of the commanders. They just suck and aren’t worth recruiting! Troops Reubenite Archer  Men with shortbows in the Late Age, utterly garbage, we will never recruit them. Benajimite Slinger  Rainbow clad, dual-wielding, slinger with a pillager bonus. Cool fluff, bad unit. Naphtali Spearman  Very “standard” infantry…for Early Age. They’re kind of crappy, but we’ll use some in the very early game when we can’t recruit anything else. Zebulunite Soldier  They look swag and fight in formations, but we’ll still never use them. Zebulunite Horn Blower  They carry a really boss looking horn and have the Standard effect that gives a moral boost to the unit they’re in. Very occasionally recruited. Gadite Swordsman  We’re getting into some of our “better” troop choices now, this guy is OK and has Fire Resistance but we won’t bother. Asherite Soldier  Cool green outfit, carries a Tower Shield so is very helpful against massed arrow fire. We’ll recruit a few but not for long. Levite Zealot  The first of our Sacred troops! Levite Zealots are aggressively average soldiers with an actually useful bonus to Patrolling, but they are sacred. They are also recruitable at every one of our forts that also contains a Temple. We will be recruit a -lot- of these guys, because they will be fantastic chaff when combined with our Bless. Gittite Soldier  The first of our giant troops, and lesser giants at that. These guys are hardly larger than a normal man, have a little Fire Resistance, and average stats. We won’t bother. Gibbor  The cream of the crop, these are our elite giant heavy infantry. They’re big, have great stats, wield magical swords, and are sacred. They are cap-only, so we’ll only ever be able to field a small number of them. However, they’re badass and Good, and combined with our Bless will be even better. We’ll recruit the maximum number of which we are capable every turn for the entire game. Commanders and Mages Iassacharaite Scout  A scout! Slightly more Stealth value than an indie scout. We’ll make a handful throughout the game in order to keep tabs on our neighbors. Benjaminite Commander  A commander version of the Benjaminite Slinger. We’ll never bother. Iassacharite Sage  A cheap, sacred, lovely mage. They are meant to be a researching workhorse, never a battlefield hero. We will occasionally recruit them for research duty when have income issues that keep us from recruiting real mages. Iassacharite Sibyl  A simple mage, not sacred but useful nonetheless. Very useful for Communion shenanigans later in the game. We’ll recruit some. Levite Priest  lovely, H1 priest that will never be worth the recruitment opportunity cost. Gittite Commander  A giant commander, more robust than any independent commander. Can lead 80 troops, which is pretty good. We’ll recruit these dudes a handful of times. Abba  Now we are getting to our mages. These guys are N2 with a 100% FSE random path. They let us forge Nature boosters and with those can cast some OK battlefield spells. They are also Healers, which is a really, really nice thing to have as any nation. They are Heretics, so they harm our Dominion strength merely by existing, but they’re well worth it. We’ll recruit a fair number. Yeddeoni  Here is our workhorse mage, a jack of all trades but master of none. The Yeddeoni is a E1D1 mage with a random 100% FESD pick. That means these puppies can come as E2 or D2 (great for forging or battle magic), F1D1 (lets us forge an important Fire booster item), and the Astral randoms can forge us a vital Astral booster as well. We’ll recruit many Yeddeoni. The only drawback is that they’re not sacred, so upkeep costs become a thing. Kohen  Kohen are B1H2 mage-priests with a 100% FES random. They are pretty much the backbone of our Blood Hunting industry. They’re terrible on the battlefield, but they’re vital to our success. We’ll recruit a -lot- of them. Seren  A true giant commander! These guys look and sound badass, and you couldn’t really ask for a more robust general. We’ll never recruit a single one, however, because they are cap-only and thus would take up a turn of recruitment that would otherwise be used for… Kohen Gadol  Our cap-only mage. The Kohen Gadol is a mighty giant B2H3 mage-priest. They come with an awesome 100% +2(!!) FES random and a 10% chance for an additional level of FES. Having recruitable Holy 3 priests is wonderful because that’s how you cap Thrones. Their magic diversity lets them forge a variety of items, and will allow us to summon lots of cool stuff from the Blood school of magic. They are slow-to-recruit which means it takes 2 game turns to recruit 1 Kohen Gadol, but we’ll set them on auto-recruit for the entire game. Pretender God It is Dominions tradition to name your Pretender God something moronic, so here is ours:  The Might of Zionism is a Great Black Bull. I picked the GBB because it is the best chassis we had access to that could pull off a heavy Nature and Blood bless. This bless will allow our sacred units to both Regenerate and to reflect damage they take back upon the one who inflicted it. It’s a monster bless, and we had to do some monster damage to both our Dominion strength and our Scales to get it. Let’s talk about Scales for a moment. You can see that we’ve taken Turmoil 3, Sloth 3, Heat 2, Growth 3, Luck 2, Magic 2 scales. In layman’s terms: we’ve tanked our regular, dependable income scales in order to afford our double bless. Hopefully our Luck and Magic scales combined with the increased chance of random events that come from Turmoil scales will help trigger events that give us money and gems to make up for the greatly reduced income. We’ve taken heavy Growth because we will be blood hunting extensively in this game and Growth scales, which ever so slowly increase the population in a given province, help to mitigate the population destruction that blood hunting causes. Now take a look at our Dominion strength: It is 6. A dominion strength of 6 is not optimal, like, at all. Our Dominion is weak, it is susceptible to being pushed away by stronger Dominion, and it can't push hard against opposing Dominion itself. A Dominion strength of 6 is a terrible choice to make, but for one exception: Blood Sacrifice. Our nation, Gath, gives our Priests the ability to perform Blood Sacrifices instead of Preaching up the Dominion of our God. Blood Sacrifices are just like they sound, you sacrifice a blood slave in order to make a much more powerful temple check than a regular priest. The higher the Holy magic level of the sacrificing Priest the more potent the strength of a given blood sacrifice. Nations with Blood Sacrifice (Blood Sac, for short) are well known for being able to aggressively push their Dominion to the detriment of all of their neighbors. In the first Mo Money Mo Problems game I played a different nation and went with no bless and very good scales. I ended up with more money than I could spend, so for this game I tanked my scales and went for a double bless, figuring the income penalty would be made up for by the game settings. This may not turn out to be entirely true in action. However, this double bless combined with our recruit-everywhere sacred Levite Zealots means that we should have the very best chaff of anybody in the game. Cheap, regenerating, damage reflecting little men to stand between our mages and the enemy army. Opponents will find that a lot of powerful battle magics become a liability as the mages that cast the spells immediately die from the reflected damage. Our armies of sacreds will keep our enemies flummoxed as we blood hunt up a storm within our kingdom, eventually summoning demons and devils and all sorts of other things with which to flood the world in a tide of wickedness! That was the plan, anyway. Now you get to see how it all turned out… How are u fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Sep 18, 2016 |
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Sep 18, 2016 20:33
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Turn 1  Turn one is usually a very quick and boring turn, but let’s take a look at what information we can gather from our initial look at the world.  Our capitol province, Gath, is farmland, which is pretty good. Capitol provinces can start on any type of terrain and farmland is one of the good types. Forest and mountain type terrain are good as well, as they provide a resource bonus which is useful for building starting armies. Plains type terrain provides no bonuses, and swamp and wasteland type terrain are straight up lovely. I’m definitely happy to have started in farmland. Next we see our initial connecting provinces. We have Vath, which is a plains province, Dead Forest which is a forest, the mountain province of Grey Mountains, and another plains province, Tenvir, which is separated from Gath by a river. Rivers are a type of barrier between provinces that are impassable unless they ice-over. Icing-over can only happen if there are Cold scales in both of the provinces connected by the river. Because we took Heat 2 on our Pretender, we are likely never going to see that river ice-over and become passable. We start our game with two commanders, a Scout and a Gittite commander.   I send the scout into the Grey Mountains so we’ll have a more accurate estimate of the independent army that resides there next turn. The Gittite commander I set to become our Prophet next turn. Pro-Dominions players know that the cool thing to do is to rename your future-Prophet on turn 1 so that when his new status is declared to the whole world everyone else can see how awesome you are. I rename our Gittite commander “A Bulldozer for Palestinian Homes”, an appropriate name that glorifies our Pretender, The Might of Zionism.  Finally, I recruit 3 Gibborim, the maximum we can afford with our current resources, and one scout commander. I could recruit a mage but I reckon that a little bit of extra scouting info early on will come in handy. I also put in a 191 gold bid on a mercenary, Madam Fortuna, who is just a mage with a 10 man bodyguard. If I snag her she’ll never go into battle, just sit and research a bit.  Bonus! Libluini's LP: Turn One How are u fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Sep 18, 2016 |
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Sep 18, 2016 20:50
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Yeah the thought was that I'd eventually build up enough temples to get my sacred recruitment value to max, and the danger of getting my dominion pushed by somebody else's stronger dominion could be mitigated by blood saccing.
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Sep 19, 2016 01:52
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Turn 2 Turn two begins with 9 proclamations of prophethood from nations of the world. Nine proclamations means that two nations either forgot to declare a prophet (unlikely) or wanted to recruit a specific unit on the first turn to make their prophet next turn. The prophets declared were: Man: Dwarf of Falseness the Castellan shall hereby be known as the prophet of Helloween. Ulm: Dave Rogers the Commander of Ulm shall hereby be known as the prophet of Beat of the Rising Sun. Mictlan: PRODUCER PUNCH!! the Tribal King shall hereby be known as the prophet of Avatar of Jeremy Clarkson. Pangaea: Dwight D. Eisenhower the Cataphract Commander shall hereby be known as the prophet of The Military-Industrial Complex. Bogarus: that drunk hot girl at the bar the Voivode shall hereby be known as the prophet of 10x Surge Pricing for Uber. Patala: Bryan Pagliano the Bandar Commander shall hereby be known as the prophet of Holy Cow. Gath: A Bulldozer for Palestinian Homes the Gittite Commander shall hereby be known as the prophet of The Might of Zionism. Ragha: Bling bling da money hoe the Paighan-Salar shall hereby be known as the prophet of I bought a boat. Xibalba: Kianto the Batab shall hereby be known as the prophet of dat boi. Not the best roster of prophet names, but not terrible. Bonus points go to Pangaea for picking a great one. Next our message show that we won our bid on Madam Fortuna the mercenary! She will spend the next few turns sitting and putting her 12 research points to use. She’ll do this forever or until I forget to re-bid on her and lose her.  Finally, we got a hero!!  drat, what a shame, we didn’t actually get a hero, we got a multi-hero instead. National heroes can range from useless to exceptionally powerful and useful, but national multi-heroes are almost always “eh”. They are called “multi-heroes” because you can get multiple copies. Here we see ours is a holy 2 priest with 40 leadership. At this stage of the game he will actually be useful, I’ll send him out with my second expansion army, but in the future any more multi-heroes will probably be dead weight. Ok that is it for turn 2 messages, let’s look at the land.  We can now see what our independent neighbors look like, and they look tough. Remember that this is a Mo Money game, and thus the strength of the independent provinces was set to the highest level. Vath is full of heavy infantry and heavy cavalry, we won’t touch that just yet. Grey Mountains is likewise full of heavy infantry and cavalry. Dead Forest, however, is filled with militia, light infantry, and archers. That’s great, and we are going to smash them first. In my test games I usually waited until turn 3 and until I recruited 6 Gibborim before launching my first attack, but I feel like I should take the risk here because that looks like a pretty soft target. Our Prophet marshals our new army and sets out for Dead Forest!  In our capitol I queue up a Kohen priest-mage and 3 more Gibborim. Hopefully we are victorious in Dead Forest and we can unlock more resources at our capitol to quickly ramp up Gibbor production. We are going to need hundreds of them, and fast.  Lastly, I move our first scout onward, our new scout out of our capitol, and check the Mercenary list for new mercs. The only new merc on the list are some underwater-only triton troops, so they’re unavailable.  Fingers crossed for turn 3! Bonus! Libluini's turn two
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Sep 19, 2016 02:55
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These early turns are pretty quick and uneventful, so I think I will post more of them this first week to get us to the point where interesting things start to happen!
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Sep 19, 2016 16:50
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Turn 3 Looks like we have two more prophet declarations, the final two nations have chimed in: Jomon: Gory Johnson the Master Shugenja shall hereby be known as the prophet of The Blood Fondue. Caelum: Air Man the Storm General shall hereby be known as the prophet of Overgrown Cebalo Pinfeather. Points to Jomon for making what I’m sure is a reference to newly minted Libertarian Presidential candidate Gary Johnson. Also, I’d guess that Jomon’s pretender is a Blood Fountain based on the name. I don’t know why Caelum waited a turn to prophetize what I think is his starting commander but also I don’t care. We also have our battle report from the army we moved into The Dead Forest last turn.  Flawless victory! The only things dead in The Dead Forest are the pathetic light infantry and militia that tried to oppose us. Our three Gibborim took a lot of hits in the battle, but the regeneration from the major Nature bless kept them up, and the Blood Vengeance from the major Blood bless reflected the lovely little indies’ damage right back into their faces. I also see that our Prophet has picked up a Heroic Ability. Heroic Abilities are special abilities that units in the Hall of Fame get as a bonus for being there. Our Prophet got Iron Will, which boosts his magic resistance. It’s not the best, but it certainly isn’t bad by any means. Looking at the map, I see that one of the provinces adjacent to The Dead Forest is a forest named Summeredge, and it is also full of militia, light infantry, and archers. Since our previous battle went so well I am going to move our starting army into Summeredge and hopefully repeat the victory.  In The Dead Forest I recruit an independent commander, and I pump the Province Defense level to 25. I also check the mercenary list and see Fordo Boggit’s Elite Warriors have appeared. The Elite Warriors are a 40 strong division of armored halflings, which, due to their small size, are actually pretty tanky in combat unless they’re being pelted by arrows. I put in a 356 gold bid on them, if I win they could be useful tanking some heavy cavalry in a turn or two.  Finally, we do our recruitment for the turn. Look at how many additional resources we picked up by capturing that forest! We can now recruit 6 Gibborim at a time, our current maximum until we increase our number of Holy Points by building more temples. I’m also recruiting Naphtali spearmen to mix in with the Gibborim, they will help fill in squares on the battlefield and take some hits instead of the Gibborim. For our commander I have queued a Yeddeoni. I will need to be recruiting Kohen blood priests to bless my expansion armies, but I hope to also grab a few of my other mages to begin walking through our newly conquered provinces to search for magic sites. However, expanding quickly is priority number 1 right now. Bonus! Libluini's turn three
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Sep 19, 2016 20:09
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Sloppy Milkshake posted:i didn't read any of this but i want howareu to feel good and popular Thanks friend. See folks, this is an example of how kind and supportive the SA Dom4 community can be. Join us!
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Sep 19, 2016 21:29
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OpenlyEvilJello posted:How are u and other Dominions players, what is your favorite heroic ability? I think it would pretty unanimously be 'Unequaled Obesity'. e: In terms of sheer utility one of the better Heroic Abilities a commander can get is 'Inspirational Presence' which gives a morale bonus to the troops the commander is leading. They can also get an ability that gives them Fear, the magic resistance from 'Iron Will' is always welcome, and there's one that gives Reinvigoration as well. But Unequaled Obesity just owns because the game has decided your commander is a fat sack of poo poo. How are u fucked around with this message at 13:32 on Sep 20, 2016 |
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Sep 20, 2016 13:24
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Turn 4 Two messages for this turn. First we see our battle in Summeredge:  We won, but we lost 6 units. At this early point in the game we need every little pixel man we can get, so that’s a shame. The second message is an event that happened in The Dead Forest. It’s a tax boost event, unexpectedly good harvest, taxes +100% and -8 unrest. That’s great, free money for us! I also notice that we failed to hire Fordo Boggit, it looks like Xibalba snagged the Halfling mercenary. We put in a bid to keep Madam Fortuna while we are at it, as her contract expires next turn. There are no other fresh useable mercs to hire. Since our Prophet’s army is diminished and we don’t have any really soft targets adjacent to Summeredge I think the best course of action is to reinforce. We are moving our Prophet and his army into Grey Mountains, one of the heavy infantry and heavy cavalry provinces in our cap circle. Also moving into Grey Mountains is the Yeddeoni I recruited last turn along with 9 fresh Gibborim and a handful of spearmen. We will crush the independents in Grey Mountain and reinforce our starting army at the same time!  We also need to unlock the resources of Grey Mountain in our capitol. Our Sloth 3 dominion is growing stronger and subsequently has impacted production in the cap. We need to clear the rest of the cap circle ASAP. Also, we discover that Summeredge has recruitable scouts, so we will recruit a scout there every turn until we can build a fort, which will be as soon as possible. I’m moving our multihero priest out of the capitol to build temples. We want a strong dominion and we have tons of cash on hand, so even though our temples are double the cost of everybody else we will be spamming them.  Finally, we have discovered two neighbors: Xibalba and Caelum. I’m not sure what to make of this just yet. Xibalba and Caelum are both flying nations, so they are super-mobile and great raiders. They don’t have the most robust troops when it comes to pitched battle, but they make up for that in other ways. I’m hoping we don’t get into an early war. I’ll reach out to them and try to make friends.   Bonus! Libluini's turn four
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Sep 20, 2016 19:20
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Turn 5 A single message greets us at the beginning of turn 5, how exciting.  Looks like we won our battle in Grey Mountain but we lost 9 Naphtali Spearmen doing so. The spearmen were in their own little group standing ahead of the rest of the army, and the charging heavy cavalry ripped them to pieces with their lances. RIP lovely chaff, you did your job.  Taking Grey Mountain was a good move, though. We have unlocked some of its resources in our capitol and are back to full production. We won our bid for Madam Fortuna and we get to keep her for 3 more turns, as useful as that is. We are also putting a 430 gold bid in on a new band of mercs that popped up this turn: Bernard’s Brave Men. I think they are generic human swordsmen or something similar. If I win them they will be useful in eating more heavy cavalry lances when we try to take Vath. I move our reinforced Prophet army north to Tenvir, the province in our cap circle that is cut off by a river. Scouting shows that it is full of light infantry, crossbowmen, and heavy infantry. Hopefully 11 Gibborim and some filler chaff will be enough to smash those guys up. The Yeddeoni that brought the reinforcements to the battle will stay behind and search for magic sites.  The first scout we recruited in Summeredge begins construction of our first new building, a castle. All infrastructure in Gath is expensive, so we don’t have the option of building 800 gold fortresses, instead we can only build 1000 gold castles or 1200 gold citadels. More expensive fortifications also come with greater defense values, which is very useful in a siege, but the tradeoff is that they take longer to construct. Our first castle will be ready in 6 months time. Bonus! Libluini's turn five
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Sep 21, 2016 09:31
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Meinberg posted:I look forward to seeing Gath defeated on Turn 50. Sorry, friend, but considering I posted this LP with a 75 turn delay you'll have to wait at least that long. I may be defeated though! Also, have you stopped to consider that Gath is Cool and Good and that you are the one who is actually Bad?
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Sep 21, 2016 09:52
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Libluini posted:Rewatching this and comparing with Gath makes me realize how lucky the combination of huge expensive tramplers and lots of money is. Around this time I expanded faster than Gath simply because of my mammoths stepping on everything in my way. It was around turns 4 and 5 when I realized quite how truly awful my scales were going to be in practice rather than in theory, and I knew my expansion wasn't going as fast as I'd like. Very few people like to engage in year 1 wars but if either you or Xibalba had wanted to invade me your superior economies + better mobility would probably have bottled me up in my cap very quickly and I would have been basically dead.
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Sep 21, 2016 09:56
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Mr Toes posted:I think I'm another for the 'love watching games play out, but would almost certainly hate playing it'. It seems like a particularly punishing 4X, and I have a horrible feeling that Id get to a certain point and discover that my god is poo poo / my scales are bollocks / I've forgotten to build an army, at which point I'd be utterly steamrolled. This totally happens sometimes. Then you lose and just join another game having learned something.
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Sep 21, 2016 16:33
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Also, unless your name is Ramc or Nuclearmonkee you are going to be losing the majority of games you play in anyway. A game will last a couple months and I think most people aren't in more than 4 or 5 games at any given time. Games will have 8-12 players on average and, you know, there can be only one winner. I just expect to ultimately lose each game and try to have fun while I can. When I win its a very pleasant surprise.
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Sep 21, 2016 17:00
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Glazius posted:So with all this dolla floating around, are mercenaries commanding a much higher price? I imagine just having the unit to move around would be its own kind of advantage. I can't remember 100%, but you can see that I mention attempting bids on several companies of mercs that never panned out because I lost the bid. Mercs in this game, however, were probably mostly useful as lance catchers for independent heavy cavalry provinces. Because the game setting had indies set to maximum difficulty it would be unlikely that most merc squads would be able to take many provinces on their own. Mercenaries really shine when you can use them as an independently functioning expansion army, exponentially increasing your expansion rate in the first year or so of the game. In this game, as turns pass and people gain more territory, massing national units becomes much more useful than bidding up mercs very quickly.
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Sep 22, 2016 02:54
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Turn 6 Turn six begins with a message from the bird-men of Caelum:  Excellent news! The Caelan Grand Council accepts our offer of peace and we now have a 12 month Non-Agression Pact (NAP). Neither Caelum nor I will fight each other for the next year. Within the SA Dominions community NAPs are taken pretty seriously, and if you break one without good reason you will quickly develop a reputation as a fucker and people will be much less likely to work with you in the future. We’ll send a reply back to Caelum and then focus on the task at hand.  Next we see that our Yeddeoni found a magic site in Grey Mountain, that’s great!  The magma cave is a fine site to find. Not game changing by any means, but certainly not poo poo. I will gladly take the earth and fire gems, very useful. I move the Yeddeoni down into The Dead Forest to search there next month. Our battle in Tenvir went pretty well!  We lost a few Naphtali spearmen, which is not a problem in the slightest. I’d set a small group of 4 spearmen out in front of our main force to soak the crossbow hits. The AI in Dominions is pretty predictable, and archers are very, very likely to just shoot at the closest thing they can see unless specifically scripted otherwise. The independent crossbows spent the whole time murdering a couple useless spearmen while my Gibborim slaughtered the infantry. We move the Prophet’s army to Ablach, Tenvir’s northern neighboring province. Ablach looks like it has the same crossbow, heavy, and light infantry defenders that Tenvir had, so we should be able to take it without much effort.  The final message of the turn lets us know that our newly conquered province of Tenvir has experienced a bunch of unrest this month. Unrest, misfortune, and two units cursed. That sucks, but it shouldn’t be the end of the world. Tenvir will go back to normal soon enough. Lastly, we move our fresh and new second expansion army out of Gath and south into The Dead Forest. Next turn we will be using it to take the province of Range of Light, which looks like it has the same defenders as Tenvir and Ablach. We also change up our recruitment.  Since we’ve cleared most of our cap-circle we now have tons of extra resources available in our cap. We won’t be recruiting any more Naphtali spearmen, instead we will use extra resources to pick up 9 Asherite soldiers and 1 Zebulonite Horn-Blower a turn. The Asherite soldiers have tower shields that will be much, much better at defending against crossbow bolts than the little shields of the Naphtali spearmen. The horn-blower has the Standard ability, which confers a moral boost to his unit. Extra moral is always useful.   Next turn: more conquest! Bonus! Libluini's turn six.
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Sep 22, 2016 03:00
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Turn 7 We get a single message this turn; thrilling. Looks like our battle report for our Prophet’s army in Ablach. We won the battle, but lost a single Gibbor. That’s a shame, but I’ll take it. We send our army into the adjacent forest of Boar Woods, which contains a poo poo-load of woodsmen. Woodsmen are very lightly armored but carry dual-daggers and some have blow-pipes. I really wish I had 25 archers for this battle, I could well be sending the army to its death. From The Dead Forest our second expansion army marches into Range of Light. Let’s hope they do a great job!  Our Yeddeoni in The Dead Forest is going to search for magic sites, the Nabi Priest multihero finished building a temple in Summeredge where our first castle is 4 months away from completion. We will be starting construction of another castle in Ablach next month, so our priest is moving north to build a temple there. Scouts continue to sneak. The last notable piece of information from the turn is that we have found another neighbor! It looks like the kingdom of Man will be our westerly neighbor. That gives us Xibalba to our East, Caelum to our South, and Man to our West. We are on the northernmost edge of the game-map so we are safe on that side.  We’re moving a scout onto Man’s capitol province next turn, but from what we can see right now two of his cap-circle provinces are unclaimed. This may mean that Man is having difficulty expanding, which would be great. We want to grab as many provinces as we can before anybody else contests them. We’ll find out more next turn! Editor Note - Looking back at this turn for the first time in months I realize that there are only 3 screen shots, which is Boring and Bad. Believe me, this is not indicative of most future posts, which contain an average range of 8-17 images. The early game is kind of simple and quick. I'll be posting actual battle images as well, promise. Bonus! Libluini's turn seven
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Sep 22, 2016 23:33
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Turn 8 First message for the turn is that our Yeddeoni didn’t find any magic sites in The Dead Forest. Dang, well he is moving on to Summeredge to check for sites there and also to build a Lab for our first castle. Next we have two battles. First the battle in Boar Woods with the woodsmen that I was concerned about :  Total victory! We only lost a couple lovely spearmen. What’s more, Boar Woods has two visible sites in it already, a Mine of Superior Iron that provides resources and a Wild Forest that provides one nature gem. The resources are welcome considering our Sloth dominion, and I’ll always take nature gems, they are invaluable. We send the Prophet’s army into the plains province of Blackdale next. This could be bad, but all of the independent provinces adjacent to Boar Woods are heavy infantry + heavy cavalry mixes. Blackdale appears to have the smallest amount of them, so off we go. Finally we have our first battle with our second expansion army in Range of Light:  Six spearmen and one Gibbor, that’s a heavy loss for us so far, but the army did kill 72 men. We are going to take this army and send it north into Vath, the heavily defended cap-circle province full of heavy infantry and heavy cavalry. We’re also going to move the Gibborim and Asherite soldiers we’ve recruited for the past 2 turns in our capitol into Vath at the same time. The two armies will crush the indies and then combine, after which it should be strong enough to easily stomp any indie province going forward.  Next turn we’ll see some more battle results! Bonus! Libluini's turn eight
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Sep 24, 2016 21:09
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Apocron posted:Things seem to be proceeding smoothly. Do you tend to be an aggressive player? No, I don't consider myself to be an aggressive player at all. If I had it my way I'd prefer all nations to unite in peaceful cooperation for some kind of happy unification victory, haha. Personally, I prefer to secure my home territory and get some research and mage production going before thinking about war, because that'll give you the most options and let you think about whom you can be most effective against. Some players, on the other hand, will rush your rear end right away if you are a nation with a slow and/or weak start. In the first year and a half of the game people do not often go to war because there are still independent territories to take, and why fight somebody else when you can murder indies and take territory? That said, in the next 5 or 6 turns we're going to run out of indies and then the real game begins.
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Sep 25, 2016 15:11
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Turn 9 Our first message of the turn lets us know that we’ve hit our first research milestone in the Alteration school. At this stage of the game expansion is still far more important than research, but without eventual research goals you'll enter the mid-game rudderless and less effective. Because we’ll almost certainly be leaning heavily upon our double-blessed sacreds in our first war research is not something I’ve thought too hard about. I chose Alteration because there is a pretty good spell, Earth Meld, at Alt 2 that could be useful, and I could possibly have the mages to cast it. Anyway, we did some research, woo. Next we have our battle report for our Prophet’s army invading Blackdale:  Victory, with what are honestly pretty minor losses! Great job! Blackdale doesn’t have any visible magic sites, but it does have recruitable Scouts so I set up recruitment and move our army south into the province of Camia. Now, Camia is inhabited by barbarians, one of the most dangerous types of indie. They hit really hard with two-handed greatswords. We’ll see how we do. Also, Camia touches the nation of Man’s cap-circle, so if Man hasn’t noticed us yet he is going to next turn for sure. We haven’t reached out to him yet. Next is our battle report for Vath:  Looks like we lost a little bit of chaff, a single Gibbor, and the poor Zebulonite Horn-Blower  But we captured the province! We transfer the reinforcements from our capitol to a single commander and move the new, stronger army east into the very rich province of Summerbay. Incredibly, Xibalba still hasn’t captured Summerbay, despite having bordered it for 4 or 5 turns now and it being defended by militia, light infantry, and heavy infantry, fairly weak collection of units. We are taking it for our own, and then we’ll see what Xibalba is up to.Our last three messages for the turn all involve events. Now, remember that I took both Chaos and Luck scales, each of which increase the chance of events happening. The luck scales should generally help to keep the events positive in nature, but there’s no guarantee. Example: what happened this turn in our province of Tenvir.   We had two separate “province invasion” events happen at the same time, and to add insult to injury it seems as though the Villains and the Barbarians figured they’d team up and attack my province defense together!  In a normal game this would almost certainly mean a lost-province, but since this is a Mo Money style game I had enough cash on hand to pump Tenvir’s province defense rating to 25 when I captured it. The independent invasion ends in a total rout.  Next turn we conquer Summerbay and take its wealth, we either slay the barbarians of Camia or die gloriously in the process, and we start up talks with Man and Xibalba. Bonus! Libluini's turn nine
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Sep 25, 2016 18:13
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Turn 10 Our Yeddeoni in Summeredge found a magic site! Looks like we now have a Garden of Bones, which gives us 1 death gem a turn. I’ll take it!  Next we see our battle against the barbarians and Camia:  gently caress! We killed all but a single barbarian!! Lost a few Gibborim then our morale broke and we ran. That is hosed up, because now we see that a Mannish army took the province to the north. Now province Camia is super weak and Man might send his army in to claim it for his own. If we had taken the province I doubt he’d have contested it, but now we risk losing our prophet to a “bump” between armies. There’s no choice, however, I want that province. I hop on IRC to try and get ahold of ubaten, Man’s player, to try and keep a bump from happening. I also fire off an in-game message in case I can't get a hold of him.   We also did not take the province of Summerbay that we were marching on last turn. What happened? Well, diplomacy happened. Before the game turned I chatted with the Xibalba player, Iloveu, and he informed me he was moving into Summerbay this turn. I told him he could have it if he allowed me to take the mountain province south of Summerbay, Urd, and in exchange for a 6 turn NAP. I really, really don’t want to get into an early war with Xibalba for many reasons, so I am happy to have even a 6 turn NAP buffer. I have a feeling we will be going to war sooner than later, however. The army that was set to invade Summerbay moves south to take different provinces.  Finally we have two unexpected events: a +50 income event in Range of Light and a -2 dominion event in Boar Woods. Next time we will see how our relationship with Man progresses, and will hopefully have Camia for our own. Also, our first fort will complete construction! Bonus! Libluini's turn ten
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Sep 26, 2016 21:24
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Fat Samurai posted:Isn't an in game message kinda pointless? Man will receive it next month. 1) Yes, in this situation that message will be pretty pointless if I can't get in touch with Ubaten and he decides to take Camia. He'll get the message the same turn he takes the province. However, assuming I can't get a hold of him any other way at least he'll get the message and maybe we'll be able to negotiate from there! 2) I wish I'd taken some screens of battles in these early turns of the game! I promise I do, and soon! From what I remember and can guess I'm pretty sure it happened because of our Bless. Our Gibborim were immediately swarmed and swamped by the barbarians, probably killed a fair number but soon took enough casualties to trigger a rout. The barbarians chased down the fleeing giants while hitting them with swords, but due to our Blood Vengence bless also did damage to themselves. At some point these extra casualties on the indie side triggered their own rout. Somehow one barbarian, probably with a limp affliction, remained on the field and thus is the new King of Camia.
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Sep 26, 2016 23:24
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my dad posted:Always play this while reading Dominions LPs: Conan music is amazing and, no joke, I actually used to put that track on while reading Dominion 3 LPs years and years ago haha. Official thread soundtrack!
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Sep 27, 2016 13:39
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Turn 11 Turn 11 starts with a message indicating that a Throne has been claimed, oh boy. Looks like Xibalba has claimed the Throne of Death, which I’ll show you here:  Taking the hit of Death scales sucks, but 5 death gems a turn is huge, even in a Mo Money game where magic site frequency is set to 75%. Xibalba is increasingly shaping up to be somebody we want dead. Next we see our second expansion army’s battle in Old Man Mountains.  Victory with a couple of chaff units dead, excellent. But uh oh, we’ve run out of room to move south. We are now reaching the stage of the early game where expansion begins to draw to a close. I move the army north to the province of Winter Peaks, and tell an indie commander that I brought with our army to stay in Old Man Mountains and build a castle.  Next we see two battles in Camia, which is bad. Man’s player didn’t see my message about claiming Camia until after the turn, it seems. One report is of Man’s army smashing the single remaining barbarian in the province, and the second is of the tiny remnant of my Prophet’s army attempting to drive the much, much larger Mannish army away. Prophet’s army:  Man’s army:   It didn’t go well, we lost obviously, but there’s a slight silver lining. One, Man’s player did in fact respond to my overture and apologized immediately for bumping my army and without prompting said he would vacate Camia for me. This leads me to believe he is not at all interested in an early war with me and wants to make me happy, so I tell him things are OK and I let him know what other provinces I will be taking, stating our borders. Two, the casualties that Man took in that battle were pretty much purely the result of my blessed sacreds’ blood vengeance ability. I think, when the time comes to fight with Man, that we will do pretty well. There was also an unexpected event that occurred in Blackdale:  These type of events are why I really like Luck scales. Free gold and blood slaves, two things of which we can never have enough. Happy day! There’s then a message letting the world know that because the Throne of Death was claimed units have aged worldwide. lovely, but not overly so. Final message is that Madam Fortuna left us, because I forgot to rebid for her services last turn. Nobody else has bid for her, so I’m putting in a fresh minimum bid for her in a province where I’d like to build a lab, that will be useful. Finally, our first fort has completed construction in Summeredge! I set it to recruit 6 Levite Zealots in perpetuity, and with our last remaining gold set recruitment of Yeddeoni. We are gold starved right now, with putting up 1000g castles and 800g temples everywhere, but soon we’ll be recruiting tons of mages all over.  Next turn: we see what Man thinks about our border proposition, and we see if other nations are also concerned about Xibalba. Bonus! Libluini's turn eleven
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Sep 28, 2016 23:26
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As the world runs short of independent provinces to scoop up there will be War, Intrigue, and copious amounts of Paranoia I can promise you that!
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Sep 29, 2016 11:02
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Turn 12 Turn 12 begins with a message that the Dormant Pretender gods are waking up. Our god is imprisoned, so we won’t be seeing him for another year+ yet. Next we see two battle reports that our scouts picked up. One is of Bogarus, a nation we have no contact with yet, crushing some wolves. That must have been the result of an event that recaptured one of his provinces. The other is of Man crushing some indies in a province we were planning to give him, not a problem. Then we have our own battle report from Winter Peaks, where our army effortlessly crushed the indies. Excellent.  We see that our Prophet took control of Camia, just as Man said he’d allow. That is great, but we see something lovely when we look to the south:  Man has taken Ironwood Forest, which is one of the provinces that we have claimed. We want Ironwood Forest so we can box off Man’s access to that Throne province, and so that we can get a little more land ourselves. I am certain that Man’s player didn’t get the chance to read my IRC message before the game turned, so we await his reaction. If I were him, I would be a little salty at having to give up a couple of provinces to my neighbor, so I am very curious to see how he reacts. I don’t want to go to war with Man, but if he is aggressive in his reaction and if I can get a longer lasting peace with Xibalba maybe we will do it. I’m moving the new army in Summeredge fort into the province of Forest of Springs, hoping that we end up bumping into Man and killing one of his armies. I think that with his army of ranged dudes he may move into Forest of Springs next, since it is barbarians and he’d likely smoke them easily. We’ll see how that goes.  Finally, we had some lovely luck in Old Man Mountains, the province we conquered last turn and just started a castle within. An event led villains to attack, and since I ran out of money last turn I didn’t put much more than 1 PD in the province. We lost it.  1000g for the castle construction flushed down the drain, a real tragedy. I send the army next-door back into Old Man Mountains to reclaim it, and we will not let that happen again. gently caress bad events! Overview of the turn:  Bonus! Libulini's turn twelve.
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Sep 30, 2016 23:16
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Apocron posted:That seems like spectacularly bad luck. It is definitely bad luck. I took Luck 2 scales as part of our Pretender design for several reasons, but one of them was to try and cut down the number of random indie invasion events. I really dislike those, and when you are a blood nation you also don't want any increased chances of indie invasions loving with your blood hunting parties. The province of Old Man Mountains, however, is on the very edge of our little kingdom, and as you can see from the last image doesn't even have a single candle of our Dominion in it yet so there was no way for that to mitigate the chances. Dominions is a game where bad luck can gently caress you in hilarious ways. If this were a game played under the standard settings that could have possibly been a game-altering event, because losing 1000 gold like that in the early game would be so much more damaging. Thankfully, in this game it is just more of an inconvenience. e: GOTY vvvv How are u fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Oct 1, 2016 |
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Oct 1, 2016 17:57
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Turn 13 Turn 13 begins with an announcement that another Throne has been claimed:  A good throne, with positive scales and good income. Anybody would be glad to have it. We have a couple of battle reports for the turn. We get a scouted report of a Man battle where he wipes out some indies in a hail of longbow arrows and crossbow bolts, then we put the villains that ganked our province of Old Man Mountains to the sword, nobody takes territory from the Mighty Men of Gath:  Look at those beautiful, bearded warriors in action  We also clown a bunch of Barbarians in the Forest of Springs, keeping our expansion going for as long as we can!  The final message lets us know that we just got our single actual hero!  You and I will do great things together  Sabba is an awesome hero for us to get. She is Astral 3, which we can technically get on our cap-only slow to recruit Kohen Gadol mage-priests, but it is a very small chance indeed. She is also Nature 4, which is fantastic because otherwise we are hard-capped at Nature 2 on our Abbas. She is going to open up a lot of possibilities in terms of forging items and casting ritual spells [oh is she ever!], I’m super happy to have her. We send her south from the capitol to build a temple in Range of Light, where a castle will soon be completed, and then she will continue to site search and build temples. Speaking of Kohen Gadol, we built our first one this turn! He is taking a fresh batch of Gibborim and Asherite soldiers out from the capitol to take some of the last indie provinces that we hemmed into our territory during expansion. Hemming provinces in is a wise way to expand, because by weaving your expansion around difficult provinces you can deny access to other players, and then come pick them up when you have more resources. There are several of these provinces that we will pick up over the next few turns.  Finally, on the diplomatic front, Man’s player got our IRC message and he doesn’t want to give up the other two territories that I claimed. He didn’t tell us to “gently caress off” though, so I think he still wants peace. He said we could negotiate, so I’m going to back off a little and ask him to choose one of them to cede to me, and then we can establish a NAP. I’m hoping he’ll take the bait. Next turn, I’ll try to talk to Xibalba some more and see how things stand with the bats. I do not feel ready for a war, so I want to prolong peace as much as possible. We have sites to search for, and infrastructure to build! Bonus! Libluini's turn thirteen. How are u fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Oct 4, 2016 |
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Oct 4, 2016 02:02
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Demanding provinces from Man right now is mainly bluster and posturing. My big scary giants are better than his mans, but I can only build so many of them, and his economy is -much- better than mine because he's not running a single major bless, much less a double major. If he tells me to eat poo poo there isn't anything I can really do about it right now.
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Oct 4, 2016 14:45
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Turn 14 Turn 14 begins with messages from two of our Yeddeoni who didn’t find any magic sites in the provinces that they searched, what a shame .We also see a proclamation from Bogarus regarding a new prophet. Nothing special, but it shows that Bogarus lost their prophet while expanding, and is finally able to declare a new one. Then there is a series of battle reports from both our scouts and our own army. First we see that our army conquered Bithane pretty easily, that’s great and helps to consolidate our territory even more.  Those Horn Blowers tend to end up at the front of the line and then get murdered Then there are a series of “pings” that both we and Man made on Throne provinces. A “ping” is when you send a single commander to attack a province or a sieged fort in order to get a completely accurate read on the defenses. First, we’ll look at the ping we made on our closest Throne province:  We see a Sorceress, a metric shitload of barbarians, and a bunch of phantasmal warriors. That’s not bad, we can definitely take this Throne and we will do so in a handful of turns. It is a level 2 Throne, so it probably won’t be amazing or game-changing, but we will take it! Next we see the Throne that Man pinged in Gryphon Rock:   holy poo poo nobody is taking this throne for a LONG time, goddamn. Here are the Throne defenders: The Monolith is a very tough cookie, super high protection, high HP, and great magic paths with which to cast fuckery spells to ruin you:  The Watchers are high HP, high protection statues that throw lightning. Lightning is strong, and will kill armies dead. This Throne is going to be independent for a long time.  Then we see Man’s ping on the Throne in Cacevic Highlands [editor's note: I seem to have never taken a screenshot of the battle report] We have an Annunaki of the Sky and a loving poo poo-load of Spring Hawks, that is not going to be an easy Throne to take. Here’s the Annunaki:  Massive Air magic, he will almost certainly cast Fog Warriors, an incredibly powerful army-wide battlefield spell, and then rain thunder strikes down on anybody who fucks with him. The Spring Hawks are as so:  They’re strong and tough in their own way, but they are kind of a one-dimensional wonder. If you can beat their Ethereal nature (mundane weapons have a 75% chance to not affect them) and make your troops immune to lightning damage (the only damage type they can do) then they are pretty harmless. At this stage in the game, however, they’ll slaughter any army that moves. The messages for the turn end with 3 minor events in our territory, all positive, which net us a total of 10 Nature gems and 383 gold. Excellent, love it! We end the turn by queueing a couple new castles to be built in new territory, and we move more of our armies against hemmed in indie provinces. We will soon be out of expansion territory. We are already boxed in by our neighbors so once we run out of room and build our infrastructure we will need to go to war. Also, good news: We made a longer peace with Xibalba, so Man looks to be our first war. [editor's note: try to count how many times I state that so and so nation will be our first war, then switch to somebody else, before we actually enter our first war!]  Bonus! Libluini's turn fourteen How are u fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Oct 6, 2016 |
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Oct 6, 2016 00:43
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Spring hawks are actually very easy to deal with if you have either 1) lightning resist on your troops or 2) magic weapons on your troops. If you can get both then they're trivial. My Gibborim have magic weapons, and, combined with our double bless, would probably have been able to take that throne in year 2 without too much trouble. Unfortunately for Man he has none of these things. He does make good attempts though!
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Oct 6, 2016 14:30
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Turn 15 We begin turn 15 with another Throne claim message. This time it is Bogarus claiming the Iron Throne. The Iron Throne gives some resources and allows recruitment of Adepts of the Iron order. That could be useful for some nations, but seeing as Bogarus is basically Magic Diversity: The Nation, it won’t be quite as much of a win for him.   We see that Man and Ulm both proclaim new prophets, so they lost their previous ones somewhere along the way, nothing too interesting there. Next we have two battle reports, three actually but the third wasn’t a battle. First we see our Kohen Gadol led army smashed the indie enclave of Troll Peaks, bringing them effortlessly into the fold.  We also finally took the province of Summerbay. The astute reader may recall that I ceded Summerbay to Xibalba earlier, but such is diplomacy in Dominions that a few turns ago we decided that I will take Summerbay and he’ll take the province just to the south of it. Xibalba's player actually forgot that he was going to take the province, and he didn't seem to care enough to want to correct the mistake. I'm happy, because now we have a rich province, and I begin construction of a Citadel immediately!   We also take the undefended Mannish province of Ironwood Forest. Diplo outside of the game led us to reach an agreement with Man where we get to take Ironwood Forest, he keeps Walnut Woods to the south, and we establish a 1 year NAP. Again, astute readers may be thinking “but how are u, just last turn you said Man was our target!” and you would be right. However, we have a poo poo-load of very expensive castles, labs, and temples to build before we will be ready for a real war. Twelve turns is actually not a very long time in a Mo Money game. In fact, the first Mo Money game got to turn 138 and was probably just beginning to wind down before it crashed to death, so there you go.  The final message of the turn is an event that gave us 12 air gems, found in the shards of a broken mirror. I’ll take em! Lastly, we are going to take our first Throne next turn! Armies around the province of Trencebor will converge on it next month, led by one of our ferocious Kohen Gadol high priests. Mighty Gibborim and fanatical Levite Zealots will smash the barbarians and sorcerers guarding the Throne and we will take its power for ourselves.   Next turn: games involving Thrones! Bonus! Libluini's turn fifteen
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Oct 8, 2016 19:10
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Deceitful Penguin posted:So how aware of your non-neighbours are you at this point? Any players that already look like they might be pulling in too much power? At this point in the game I am vaguely aware of other nations than my neighbors. We have scouts starting to snake off into the unknown, and I have probably discovered that Pangaea is just to the South East of Xibalba, and that Patala is Man's neighbor to the West and Xibalba's to the East. I don't have any real idea of what things look like in the far Southern portion of the map where I assume Mictlan, Ragha, and Ulm are all located. Regarding power, well, we don't know much! In Dominions 4 the default settings have Score Graphs turned Off. When you pull up the Score Graphs you only see the information for your own nation. You can gain the ability to look at other nations' score graphs by various means, most commonly by infiltrating a nation's capitol with a Spy type unit. There is also the spell The Eyes of God which reveals all of the score graphs for everybody for the person who casts it. But yeah, at this point, with expansion ending, I am feeling like we've done an OK job, and aren't substantially smaller than any of our neighbors.
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Oct 9, 2016 21:29
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sullat posted:Hey, cool, another Dom LP. I should get back in the game one of these days. Is LA Ulm still stupid overpowered? You're not going to want to let him snowball. LA Ulm is still definitely very powerful if you let them live past year 1. We'll learn more about Ulm in the future...!
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Oct 10, 2016 01:08
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Turn 16 We begin turn 16 with a message indicating that we have completed a level of Thaumaturgy research. I switched our research out of Alteration and into Thaumaturgy a little while back when it became clear that we were not going to get into an early war. Thaumaturgy 3 and 4 have four site-searching remote spells that I want. In many games people don’t bother with those spells, I tend to like them, and because the site frequency in this game is set to 75% it will be worth searching every province we own very thoroughly. Next we see that Ulm claimed the Throne of Life:  3 nature gems and +1 to growth scales, a really great Throne to have. I’m jealous, especially considering what we will see in a moment. We see that two of our mages found magic sites when they searched for them last turn!   2 astral pearls and 1 nature gem, nothing game-changing but I’m happy to have them! We see that Man crushed another group of indies, boring, but then there’s the report from our Throne battle!  I do not understand why I didn't take more screens of the battlefield in these early turns. I very much rectify this later on. We annihilated the Throne guardians, not even a contest. So, what is our amazing Throne prize??  The Throne of Misfortune?!  Terrible! Yes, when claimed, the Throne of Misfortune gives a very generous 4 pearls a turn, but it comes at the cost of +1 misfortune scale. I am so loathe to do that to my nation! Ugh, I may wait a little bit before claiming this throne, what a drat shame. We start construction of a Citadel, Temple, and Lab on the province as well as search it with the mages already there. Mages from other labs are sent on a trek across the country to Trencebor so they can search as well. Throne provinces are auto-tagged with the “manysites” tag, which means that there could be a poo poo-load of sites hiding there. Maybe we’ll get luckier with a great hidden site There’s a battle report for a Bogarus battle against some indies, unimportant except for the fact that his Pretender God took part, so we get a peek at that.   Kind of lackluster, Bogarus must have taken it as an awake expander, it is useless for anything else. The final three messages are an event that gave us a couple fire gems and astral pearls, an announcement that because the Throne of Life has been claimed units across the world have gotten younger, and a report that our patrolling troops in Summerbay took care of the unrest in the province. Next turn: Somebody is dumb enough to try to take one of those level 3 Thrones  Bonus! Libluini's turn sixteen
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Oct 11, 2016 21:37
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Lord Koth posted: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. Oh, well crud. I'll admit I don't watch them through before posting an update, so if somebody would like to figure out what Libluini video synchs to my current update that would be cool. Or, I can just let Libluini post a link to the correct video in the timeline for each update. I'll just stop linking them until then!
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Oct 12, 2016 01:59
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Shady Amish Terror posted:Ah, yeah, I'd forgotten about how a lot of the weird events require multiple scales to be at certain levels, my bad. Point stands in general that Misfortune 1 or 2 is usually not all that threatening except in the early game. Four pearls per turn IS pretty boss. I also failed to mention how the site density would affect the mental calculus as well, though I was at least vaguely aware of it; if this were a game with extremely low site odds, four pearls per turn would be an amazing coup, and the main reason it's not an automatic immediate 'yes please' in this game is partially because it makes less of a difference when there's magic sites everywhere. 1) Yeah, its just +1 Misfortune scale, which would move our current Luck 2 --> Luck 1. Still, I hate Misfortune! We've already seen indies invade us a couple of times, costing us 1000g worth of constructing a Castle. 2) Actually, I have been told many times that some of the very best events come from having low level Death scales. Princes and Noblemen drop dead fairly often and leave you their fortunes of 1000s of gold and random magic items.
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Oct 12, 2016 02:45
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Glazius posted:Do your scales spread along with dominion? That is, can you use this throne effect to plague other people with lower Luck scales with even more misfortune than they already had? Your scales are your Dominion, White Candles represent the strength of your Dominion but are really just only that. So, when your Dominion spreads so do your scales. Now, I am a little bit unsure as to how your scales affect other players, but as far as I can recall there are some scales that will -never- benefit other players and some that do. Example: I spread my Luck scales into my neighbor's territory, but even though his province under my Dominion now has Luck he won't receive the benefits of Luck. I've heard, though I can't remember where, that it could actually be that my Luck scales would function as Misfortune if they're manifest in a province that's owned by somebody else. An example of a scale that can never be a negative would be Growth. If my Growth scales are in my neighbor's province they will never function as Death for him. I'm 9/10 sure that they'll continue to function as Growth. I hope more knowledgeable people can chime in on this because I certainly don't know for sure!!
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Oct 13, 2016 02:07
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Turn 17 Turn 17 begins with disappointing news: none of the mages we had site-searching last turn found a thing. That’s a shame, but it really just means that they didn’t find anything at their level of magic. I choose to believe that this means that there are actually tons of higher level sites hiding in our territory!  We also see that Ragha has declared a new prophet. Interesting, all of these dead prophets. It takes, I believe, 5+ months to pass before “the dead prophet’s power has left the world” and you are able to choose a new one, so I wonder if people were having a more difficult time expanding than I realized. Either way, this is non-news. Then we have 3 scouted battle reports of other nations. We’ll look at the two involving Man and Patala first. In Cederwood Forest a mid-sized Mannish army 300 strong smashed to pieces some Patala province defense. Bad luck for Patala, I did send him a PM on IRC letting him know that Man was planning to do it though. Man had mentioned his desire to go to war with Patala, and the better that Patala is able to defend himself (and the more intractable the war) the easier it will be for us to stab Man in the back when our NAP expires. This is just the opening move in the chess match that will be their war:   Some of the units Man is fielding in this army.  Next in The Curtain Wall we see Man’s small army got beaten by province defense + a few crossbowmen. Huh. That’s odd, because Man had 20 Tower Knights in his army. Tower Knights are Mannish heavy cavalry that are normally prohibitively expensive in gold and resource cost, but in a Mo Money game can actually be fielded without much issue. They’re drat tough, and should have wrecked that PD.   Haha! Well this explains it:  The Tower Knights and the PD Heavy Cavalry ran right by each other in order to slaughter the other side’s archers. The PD Heavy Cavalry murdered the hell out of Man’s longbowmen, who routed and in doing so led the Cav straight to Man’s single Commander, who they effortlessly killed. With the commander dead Man’s Knights routed and the Heavy Cav picked 8 of them off while they fled. lovely luck for Man, but the lesson here is always screen your archers. If the Tower Knights had just gotten into melee with the Heavy Cavalry this never would have happened [Much like having a gun] Finally, we have a real gem of a battle report. Remember how earlier I mentioned the importance of “pinging” Thrones? Well our friend Bogarus just learned a lovely lesson about that. He blind-attacked a Throne, and not just any Throne, but the Throne guarded by the Monolith and Watchers. Here is Bogarus’ army and Pretender God, arrayed for glorious battle:   Some of the units Bogarus is fielding in this battle. And the Throne defenders, each of those grey statues is a Watcher and can hurl a ball of lightning each turn:  Like so.  Goodbye infantry.  And cavalry.  And God.  Bogarus lost 80% of his army and his God and only managed to kill a couple score Deer Tribe warriors for it. Now, this is not a completely unmitigated disaster for Bogarus. Remember, his god was designed solely for expansion and was poo poo for anything else, and at this point expansion is finished. The God fulfilled its purpose. Bogarus will be able to replace all of the troops lost in that battle in one turn. Really, it is more embarrassing than anything else, and a reminder to Always. Ping. Thrones. The final three items on the messages for the turn are events that gave us some fire gems, astral pearls, and let us know that 80 people fled some province. Nothing important. We queue up construction of one lab and two temples, infrastructure must continue to be built after all, even if it is stupidly expensive. We also move two armies out to be in a position to assault our last two hemmed-in indie provinces. The turn after next our expansion phase will be officially complete! Next turn: more site searching, more building, probably going to be boring!
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Oct 13, 2016 17:58
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