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Hello hello, and welcome to the newest version of cult classic This latest iteration of the tried and true Dominions formula came out a few months ago, following Dominions 5 a further few years back. I haven't played since Dominions 3, which came out... gently caress, After some wild & mutually unsuccessful flailing against other newbies in some intro games, I'm feeling confident enough to present to you, dear reader, the trials and tribulations of my latest attempt to seize the vacant thrones of the Pantokrator in the aptly named NewBad1. (for players who are both new and/or bad. (this is almost all players)). Dominions 3 Dominions 6 Such incredible graphical fidelity! Truly staggering. New to Dominions 6, we have separate horse and troop units for cavalry! A whole new plane of existence in the underground cave world of Agartha! We even have a whole new school of magic, fabulous glamor! and a bunch of other smaller changes - new nations, spells, a very funny image -> map generator, etc. We'll cover each in turn, as they become relevant. ... OK, so what exactly is dominions? If you've been around Let's Play for a while you've probably seen or heard tell of lore of ages past, and in fact much more skilled player than I, Libluini, has an active LP of Dominions 6 going here. I'm a fan of screenshot LPs though and haven't done one before, so surely a months-long and immensely complicated strategy game is a good first choice, right? In any case, at it's most basic Dominions is about picking a nation (from one of three eras, with over 30 nations in each era), building a pretender god (the previous big dude - the Pantokrator - has vanished and left the throne vacant, you see), and then attempting to vanquish, crush, or outright bully all of the other pretenders into surrender. You do so by recruiting troops, using them to claim provinces from independent troops, and so on and so forth until you run into the provinces of another player. At that point, *diplomacy* happens, and everything gets immensely more complicated. Along the way, you'll also be recruiting mages, performing magical research to unlock greater and greater spells, and eventually ruining the entire world with cataclysmic rituals. Fun! Hope you, uh, didn't have a lot of plans for the world after you claim the throne. Speaking of thrones, the way you actually win the game is by claiming a certain number of "Thrones of Ascension" - these are effectively provinces with special sites in them, and once you claim enough, you win! Too bad about the other dozen players who are also clambering to do the same thing... Hmm, someone seems to be trying to send a message... I wonder what it could be? ah - those kinds of gifts A typical late game battle, just casually meteor striking your opponent into carbonized dust Anyways, this is all starting to sound a bit complicated... and it is... but starting out's not so bad. I'll be piloting the Middle Age nation of Phaeacia through this game, so hop on board and we'll take a spin round the isles and see if we can't make a few "friends" along the way. Active audience participation is very limited since the game is still ongoing at this point and I'm still alive in it, but feel free to backseat drive and critique as much as you'd like. I'll be keeping at least a 30 turn gap between the LP and the current turn in the game, with a few updates per week (hopefully). Links Dominions 6 games thread the 100% official Discord Turns Nation Overview & God Design Turn 1 Turn 2 & 3 Turn 4 Turns 5-9 Turn 11 Turn 12 Turn 13 Turn 14 DarthRoblox fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Apr 28, 2024 |
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Apr 11, 2024 06:45
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Phaecia is one of my favorites. Looking forward to this!
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Apr 11, 2024 11:25
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I'm in this game as MA Man! I'm going to enjoy the tales of my eventually downfall!
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Apr 11, 2024 12:58
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Dumbminions must increase
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Apr 11, 2024 13:00
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Turn 1 Let's go ahead and jump right in, shall we? I, uh, don't actually have any saved screenshots of the first 10 turns of this game since I didn't actually decide to LP it until that point, but that's OK - we can recreate the important bits with a bit of editing. The first 10 turns or so tend to be fairly samey in any case, mostly consisting of recruiting troops, attacking indie provinces, Every turn of dominions begins with a list of messages, which is everything that occurred between the end of the last turn and the beginning of this one. This being the first turn, we always get the same two messages - the history of the world and end of chaos, and an announcement that the previous Supreme God has vanished, leaving the thrones of ascension vacant. After immersing ourselves in lore, we load up the strategic map and get a look at our start. Now, normally you only start with your capital and the surrounding provinces revealed and everything else hidden in the fog of war. Since we're using a recreation here, the fog of war is gone, but just imagine the five named provinces on screen are all that's visible. This is a bit of an unusual start for us - Phaeacia prefers a disconnected island, but the map generation sometimes doesn't create one. In that case, we're placed on a coast somewhere. In this case specifically, we appear to be at the tip of a peninsula of some kind - unusual. We'll have to explore northwards on land to expand, and hope that our dominion spreads to give us more options. We can only sail to land we can actually see, and our dominion spreading is the only way to expand our vision across the sea. So, let's take a look at our starting forces. Every nation starts with a basic army, usually suitable to taking on some of the easier independent types. This can vary widely though, with some nations getting quite formidable armies right off the bat, while others get literal hordes of unarmed small monkeys. This is about as useful as it sounds. In our case, we start with a handful of these two troop types - Phaeacian Archers and Phaeacian Light Infantry. These troops are... incredibly standard. They're almost literally the exact same as the archers and light infantry you'll find in independent provinces, and they're not exactly overwhelming there. For most unit stats in dominions, a "10" is roughly human-average. Our troops, having 10's in almost everything, are exceedingly average. They have slightly higher magic resistance, which would be good except these poor fellas will be dead long before that's relevant. They both have ranged attacks at least, which might keep them alive marginally longer. We're never going to be recruiting a single one of these. Instead, we're going to recruit a full limit of these guys: Colossi light infantry, while sharing a similar name, are in fact quite different from Phaeacian light infantry. These troops have a colossi heritage instead of human, giving them substantially better stats - twice the HP, 4 more strength, and an extra point in most other stats. While that might not sound like much, dominions is a very win-harder game. Increasing your advantage over an opponent pays increasing dividends. A unit with 10 attack trying to hit a 13 defense enemy has a 24% chance to hit, while they'd only have an 18% chance to hit a 14 defense unit. That's a 25% reduction in hit chance - very significant when most units can only take 1-2 hits before dying. Units also heal to full after each fight (aside from afflictions - a topic for later), so an army of 20hp units will take a lot less unit-attrition than one full of 10 hp units. Now, the light colossi are still a bit squishy if they're in prolonged contact with the enemy, but at the moment they're a great option because they 1) have a high damage javelin to kill from range and 2) they don't cost many resources to recruit. With no other owned provinces, we're rather resource-poor at the moment, so we can't afford the heavier troops. We're also going to recruit a new commander for our army. Our starting commanders aren't even worth screenshotting. They're basically the same as the Phaeacian infantry except capable of leading other troops and sailing human-sized troops or smaller. We might recruit a handful later on since they're OK commanders and don't require a Laboratory, which is another province improvement along with a fort. That gives them a use in being able to shuffle our troops to where they need to go, though not being able to sail with Colossi limits their usefulness quite a bit. Storm captains are, in my opinion, pretty fantastic commanders - especially in the early game. While they're expensive - one of these guys is the same as 12 Colossi lights, they offer a lot in exchange. First, they're good leaders, which means they get better formations for their troops in the tactical map, and also give morale bonuses to troops under their command. Second, they're capable of sailing our Colossi - 30 Colossi showing up on your coast unexpectedly is quite the surprise, and it enables some rather dickish tactics later on as well. Third, they're also mages - they have 2 Air magic and 1 Water magic. Magic deserves it's own post, but there's around 10 paths of magic that have 9 levels each, each with their own spells. Our captains aren't particularly great mages, but the air paths in particular make them very effective support/artillery units with some spells we'll be covering soon. I'm going to be recruiting a good number of these guys early on to lead our expansion armies. They fall off a bit later on when bigger magic comes out to play, but they remain useful for sailing army stacks around and keeping up a low level of magic support in bigger fights. The final action we'll be taking this turn is declaring our starting commander to be our Prophet. Prophetizing a unit makes them into a priest with 3 holy levels - the amount required to claim a throne. Just taking a throne province isn't enough, you also need either a priest with Holy 3, or your actual Pretender God to walk on over and lay claim to it. This is very important later in the game when you need priests to claim thrones and actually win, while every other player is trying to stop you. It's a common tactic to make your starting commander your prophet - H3 priests get access to a smite spell, which does respectable ranged damage early on and can bolster your initial expansion army. However, we're going to have our prophet stick around for a bit - our troops are fairly strong and should be able to deal with most independents, and we'd rather have our prophet preach and try to spread our dominion to hopefully spot some land across the sea. And with that, that's turn 1. You can't actually see the independent troops in your neighboring provinces on turn 1, so throwing your starting army into a province blindly is an excellent way to get them all killed - especially when you've just got a bunch of bog standard humans, like us. Next up, we'll be taking a look at Phaeacia as a nation more holistically as well as talking about the design for my Pretender. You might have noticed my pretender wasn't in the army list - this is because he's currently imprisoned, bound in the forgotten dungeons of the previous Pantokrator. He'll be breaking free in, oh, 36 turns or so. It'll be fine! fiiiiiiine! DarthRoblox fucked around with this message at 15:50 on Apr 11, 2024 |
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Apr 11, 2024 14:57
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Having a reliable blind expander is a valid strat for dominions, made harder in 6 because the independent province defenses have been... well buffed.
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Apr 11, 2024 16:23
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I look forward to seeing how my strategic missteps look from your end of things!
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Apr 11, 2024 16:36
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What is that nation? Never heard of it.
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Apr 11, 2024 17:55
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Kanthulhu posted:What is that nation? Never heard of it. I'll cover them in more depth in an upcoming overview post, but they're effectively drawn from greek mythological tradition. I think they're new as of Dom 5. If you imagine one of the greek isles from the Odyssey, you've basically the right idea. They might be a reference to a specific place in the myths, but I'm not as versed as I could be so I'm not sure. As a nation, their big thing is sailing - all of their non-mage commanders can sail over up to 2 water provinces which gives you a ton of tactical flexibility, though very dependent on terrain. And then, ALL of their commanders can sail in friendly dominion with the national Dark Sails ability which is pretty huge for mage mobility. They otherwise get bonuses from coastal provinces, and are generally strong in Air and Water with some Earth, Glamor, and Astral access as well. Their troops are pretty OK overall, but definitely aren't anywhere near the best in the game. They've got some real strengths but also big weaknesses, making them really interesting to plan around.
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Apr 11, 2024 19:10
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Turn 2 We're not going to have the start turn messages until turn 10, but I don't recall anything significant happening. One major loss is that we don't get to see everyone's funny prophet names, and/or shame nations who forgot to rename. You're allowed to rename any commander you want, but once they become a prophet or enter the hall of fame they're then stuck with their current name forever. The declaration of a prophet is also announced to the entire world, so nations who fail to rename their starting prophet accumulate a lot of psychic trauma right off the bat. As I recall, we named our prophet "Money Money Money", for reasons that will become clear in the nation overview & god design section. Shenanigans aside, we can now see our first set of independents to go bully. We can see one province further thanks to the services of our scout, and since we can sail we could technically attack any of these choices next turn. It does confirm that we're on some kind of skinny peninsula or island, which is going to limit our options quickly if our dominion doesn't spread across the sea. OK, well, that's not great but could be worse. 2 of the options are pretty scary, one is deceptively scary, and one is a cakewalk. We'll start with the cakewalk option: One of the indie "types" is various tribe factions, themed around an animal. Lion tribe are maybe the worst of the bunch, with zero armor, poor stats, and weak damage. There's often quite a lot of them in the province but it doesn't matter, any half decent troop will walk all over them. Bone tribe, on the other hand, are the one tribe type that is definitely not a pushover. They have javelins, high damage spear attacks, wear a bit of armor, and the beast hunters are also all berserkers. Berserkers gain offensive stats and protection when injured, at the cost of defense score. Their bit of armor means surviving one hit is fairly likely, and their high damage attacks can really tear through you if you're not careful. Barbarians are fairly similar to the beast tribe - light armor, high damage attacks. They don't go berserk, which is nice, but they hit for enough damage that one-shotting our colossi isn't all that unlikely. Many an early expansion army has been lost to bad luck with barbarians. We really want to outnumber them and win a fight fast - trading blows with a barbarian line is very bad for your health. Horse tribe doesn't *look* that dangerous, maybe, but the combination of massed archer fire, bonus damage on their first melee attack, and then two attacks per round due to their horse kicking things can actually really add up. This is also our first glance at one of the new dominions 6 changes - the mount and rider are now separate units, with their own stats, attacks, and hit points. In general this is considered mostly a downgrade for mounted units at this point in time - mounts tend to be quite squishy (note the lack of armor) and have very low morale and magic resistance, which is a big liability later on. In general though, horse tribe are another critical mass unit - have enough guys and you can route them quickly, but too few will get shot to pieces and then run down as they try to escape. With those options, we're definitely going into the lion tribe first. Our battle plan is pretty simple - line of colossi up front, set to close to throwing range, toss their javelins, and then charge into melee. Our human troops will hang out behind them, adding some fire volume with their own weaker weapons. Our captain doesn't have any useful spells yet, so he'll just hang out in the back so he doesn't catch an unlucky arrow. There's all kinds of complicated ways and schools of thoughts on handling indies with complex formations, but against this tier the simple line up and smash approach should work just fine. Back home, we're recruiting another full allotment of light colossi and a storm captain - given what we've seen so far, we're likely going to combine them with our current expansion army, but maybe something easier will show up as an option? We'll go ahead and make this round a two-fer, since Turn 2 is pretty much the same as Turn 1 in terms of actual action. Turn 3 Alright - first, let's check out our battle report. I'm recreating this in a test game, but the basics play out quite similarly. First, the battlefield. Our forces are on the left, the independents are on the right. The lion tribe peppers us with mostly ineffective ranged fire, while our troops close to javelin range and return fire; much more effectively. After their ammo is expended, our forces close the gap and chop their way through in short order. We take one or two losses to lucky spear hits, but overall this goes as well as expected. We do see a few of these little fellas - the tribes tend to come with an N1 mage. These mages usually aren't too threatening, but new to Dom 6 is the "animate tree" spell, which any N1 can cast. When it animates a little shrub like this it's just some extra hit points, but watch out on forest provinces - a fully grown tree is a valid animation target and it will absolutely gently caress you up this early on. And with that, we have our first new province. It even has a magic site on it that gives us one air gem per turn - handy. You usually have to send mages out to search for these, but certain sites automatically show up. We really like air gems, so this is a great early pickup. Looking further north, we see a problem. One of the vaunted thrones of ascension is directly in our only open path. This throne doesn't look super dangerous as far as it goes - heavy cavalry, heavy infantry, mostly human-tier units (thrones can get very nasty indeed), but it's a hell of a lot for turn 3. If we were any other nation, this would be a huge roadblock. Since we're Phaeacia, we can just keep moving our scout through and hopefully sail to whatever's on the far side. We also notice something come up in the mercenaries. Each turn, a mercenary group may offer their services to the highest bidder. This turn, we see Ferrus pop up, an Earth and Astral mage. He can be quite handy, since he's able to both boost our early research as well as craft several boosters that increase a mage's power in a given path. E/S is a path combo we don't have good access to - so snagging him would be quite nice. We throw in a fairly high bid; I find people often ignore the mages when it comes to mercs which is a missed opportunity imo. For next turn, we're going to move both our expansion army as well as our newly recruited reinforcements into the barbarian province. With ~30 light colossi, we should be able to put out enough damage to quickly rout the barbarians and I'd rather face them at this point than the bone or horse tribes. Our battle plan is similar to this turn - lay out a line, and let loose with javelins. Before that though, we'll go over the general outlook of Phaeacia - strengths, weaknesses, and how we're building around them with my PG design. DarthRoblox fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Apr 12, 2024 |
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Apr 12, 2024 22:48
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Yes!!! I'd been jonesing for one of these for a while. Dom seems like one (or six, I guess) of those games that I don't want to play, but I really like reading about.
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Apr 12, 2024 23:27
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mmhmm glad to see another Dom sslp
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Apr 13, 2024 02:29
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quote:When it animates a little shrub like this it's just some extra hit points, but watch out on forest provinces - a fully grown tree is a valid animation target and it will absolutely gently caress you up this early on. I don't know if anyone has numbers on how likely one is to be animated though. It would be a pretty funny way to be ruined on turn 2.
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Apr 13, 2024 02:50
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A full size tree also has 3-4 attacks for 18+ damage. Animate tree can be fearsome in a forest. They're not the most accurate, but with that many attacks you don't really need to be (usually). For those who don't know, damage is 1d6 + damage value subtracted by 1d6 + protection value. The d6 are exploding, so a 6 rolls the die again until it stops rolling a 6. A heavily armored human can expect to have 16-18 protection, typically, so an animated tree will wallop even them pretty good. Obviously they're not all powerful, but any mage with even 1 N magic and the right research can get pretty dangerous in a forest. Edit: and for humor value, darthroblox once beat Redmark in a major battle in a different game largely due to Animate Tree, from what I heard. Sadly I didn't have a scout to watch the actual fight. It's also worth mentioning that Redmark ultimately won that game. IthilionTheBrave fucked around with this message at 03:04 on Apr 13, 2024 |
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Apr 13, 2024 03:00
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I like how you had the Woods, Wolds, and Wealds. All ye olde foreste names
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Apr 13, 2024 14:21
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IthilionTheBrave posted:A full size tree also has 3-4 attacks for 18+ damage. Animate tree can be fearsome in a forest. They're not the most accurate, but with that many attacks you don't really need to be (usually). Ha, yea - that was a fun fight. "Major battle" is overselling it, but basically I was Piconye (a nation of hobbit people) squaring off against Atlantis (frog people). Atlantis had gotten together a number of golem thugs - in Dominions terms, a "thug" is a single unit that's intended to take on moderate amounts of units by itself. Each was kitted out something like this. The key elements are: 1) It has a weapon that does AOE damage to help it kill things quickly (most weapons only hit a single unit - the brands hit entire grid squares at a time) 2) It has an item that gives it regeneration, causing it to heal from its' wounds each turn 3) It has defensive items, giving it high protection. In battle, it would then self-buff with etherealness (makes a unit ignore 75% of non-magical attacks) and astral shield (gives a unit a magic shield that paralyzes attackers unless they pass a magic resistance check). Overall, this is a very effective but also very expensive thug - putting one of these together costs something like 60 gems, which is a whole lot to invest in a single unit. You really don't want these things to die regularly in order to get any kind of efficient return on your resources. On my side, I had like 5-6 of these herb-smoking hemp farmers, along with some assorted random units. Normally this would be a complete wipe - N1 mages can't do anything to actually hurt a golem - except for the aforementioned animate tree. Since this was in a forest province, their script was simple - 5x animate tree. And then, since none of their other spells could really do anything, they just went ahead and kept casting it after their script ran out. For those unfamiliar, you get to "script" 5 rounds of combat for each mage, telling them what spells to cast, to advance, hold, etc. After those 5 turns, the AI takes over and casts whatever it feels like. Typically, this is almost never the things you would actually like them to cast, but sometimes the stars align. So, while some of what they were animating was the garbage little shrubs, they were also animating the big rear end trees, like this: Even a strong golem is going to take a while to take one of these down, and meanwhile more and more assorted greenery was pouring in to keep the golem bogged down. Now, the trees couldn't actually really hurt it - they'd get a hit now and then, but the golem would heal right back up because of regen. However, after 100 rounds pass in a combat the "twilight" effect comes into play, and While it didn't wind up mattering to the overall game, it did give me a lot of joy to see the lil' guys get there day in the sun.
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Apr 13, 2024 17:00
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There are definitely a lot of ways for battles to play out in this game. Sometimes it's an epic struggle where archmages bring down the wrath of the gods until they can do no more. And sometimes when those guys fall unconscious, exhausted, the weird guys in the corner summoning rats every turn for a hundred turns win out in the end.
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Apr 13, 2024 22:46
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so does anyone actually recruit all the bone tribes, barbarians, etc to round out weaknesses in national troops? Been a very long time since I've done any Dominions.
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Apr 14, 2024 23:33
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It bears mentioning that one of the very first things nerfed in Dominions 6 was the brand new spell Awaken Forest (Animate Tree's VERY big brother, way up at the top of the research tree). Which, uh, did exactly what it said on the tin and affected the entire battlefield. It has since been amended to merely 50%, because waking up every single piece of greenery in forest provinces on turn 1 was brutally oppressive. Particularly if, say, it woke up some trees next to the opponent's mages.
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Apr 15, 2024 00:15
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:so does anyone actually recruit all the bone tribes, barbarians, etc to round out weaknesses in national troops? Sometimes, yes! Sometimes it's because they're just better than your rubbish national troops, more often it's because they fill a niche that you lack, such as hitting really hard, having darkvision for cave battles, or just having a ranged attack at all. Cynocephalians hit all three of those niches, for example. And of course, sometimes the independent poptype allows you to recruit a mage with paths you don't have access to, like the various amazons.
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Apr 15, 2024 01:45
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Cynocephelians, for reference, are big (one size category larger than humans) dog people who, as indies, have berserkers with 3 high damage attacks. Edit: although the actual nation, Andramania, also has more or less this unit with some additional cons. It's just that Andramania also has big guard dogs with halberds (who still have a bite attack) that hit like trucks for their size and have the formation fighter tag that counteracts one of the cons for being big (fewer units per square). IthilionTheBrave fucked around with this message at 02:10 on Apr 15, 2024 |
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Apr 15, 2024 02:05
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The problem with indies is that you're never actually guaranteed to find them, and they often are fairly hard to mass in quantities to be meaningful at the full scale of an army. I've talked about resources a bit, but you might see a cool heavy cav province and go oh awesome, I'm going to get myself some knights! ...and then come to find out that the province has insufficient resource production to make even a single knight per turn. You can kinda fix that by building a fort and claiming surrounding provinces, but that's a lot of investment for a troop that's ultimately only OK compared to proper cavalry nation's national cav. They can be useful in specific circumstances - recruiting some "lance catchers" to stand in front of a cavalry charge and "catch" their one-per-battle charge attack is a classic - but otherwise they're hard to rely on. Now, independent mages can be very useful, since they can get you access to magic paths you might not have on your national mages.
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Apr 15, 2024 04:51
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Nation & Pretender Design Overview With a little action under our belts (and a bit of a detour to the wonders of nature), let's take a look at our chosen nation a little more broadly. Dominions 6 Manual posted:Phaeacia is an island queendom of dark-skinned men of great stature, the Colossi. Their fabled Dark Ships traverse the seas without oars or captains. Once a colony of Berytos, the island flourished and became rich and influential, known for its traders, craftsmen and marvelous shipwrights. When Berytos was destroyed by the armies of Arcoscephale the island of Phaeacia was able to stave off the conquerors thanks to ample tributes and its remote location. The queendom has since grown in power and influence. Their traders and explorers have traveled to the far reaches of the world and brought one of the world's greatest marvels back to Phaeacia, a sapling of the golden tree of the blessed gardens of the Hesperides. Now most inhabitants of Phaeacia live unnaturally long and blissful lives detached from the strife of the world beyond their island. Phaeacia is also the home of giants descendant of Mekone. When the Gigantes’ futile war upon gods came to a disastrous end, the Gigantes that did not join the armies of the God-slayer fled to Black Korkyra, an inhospitable island of the Phaeacian archipelago. The king of the Gigantes married the Colossi queen of Phaeacia and their daughters have ruled the island ever since. Most nobles of the island trace a legacy to the Berytian Colossi as well as to the Gigantes of Mekone. There are also a few of the pure blooded Gigantes remaining on Black Korkyra. Upholding the old bargain they arrive each spring to pledge the queen their allegiance. They are not cursed as their Phlegran kin and retain some of their former glory. So, yea - fun flavor and it also informs us that Phaeacia fits into the "greek" heritage nations - this gives access to various national attributes that are shared across most nations in this group. We'll cover those in a bit. Phaeacia's big national theme is sailing, and our national power really emphasizes that. On any maps with a significant amount of water, black sails is huge - being able to jump 4, 5, sometimes even 6 provinces along a coast or cross an ocean instantly is a huge tactical advantage we'll be making good use of. We also get a +15% income bonus from coastal forts (on top of the already 15-40% bonus that forts themselves give). This gives us access to a good amount of gold, which we're really going to lean into. That's a great lead in to: Our pretender god, Who needs a bless? Choosing and designing a pretender is the first and in many ways most pivotal decision you make in Dominions. Your pretender is the only unit you have design control over, choosing their chassis (physical form), their magic paths, their scales, and their bless. Of course, all of this comes at a cost... Phaeacia gets access to a wide range of chassis. In general, they come in 4 main flavors - dominion 1 "rainbows", dominion 2 "monsters", dominion 3 "titans", and dominion 4 "immobiles". The dominion number refer to the God's starting dominion strength - we can buy more points, but starting with a higher total is advantageous since each point away from default costs an increasing amount. We're going with the Titan of Forethought. He has a few nice attributes - default paths that we want, full item slots for holding boosters, and he heals disease, cancels bad events, and gives all of our mages in his province +1 to their research. Neat! For paths, we're going with a relatively light investment. We're adding 3 points to Astral, 1 point to water, and 2 points to fire. This mix is mostly for general utility as well as access to a very good national summon we otherwise can't access. Due to our light investment, we only have a mild bless - Arcane Finesse makes our mages more likely to effect enemies, and fire resistance is pretty much what it says on the tin. Blesses only affect sacred units, and while our sacreds are very solid I don't think they justify a hell bless (investing an absurd amount of points to make your sacreds very scary indeed) and only our biggest mages are sacred. The main reason for taking a limited bless is here - we're going extremely scales heavy, maxing out basically everything that we can while also buying a high starting dominion score. Due to both typically easy expansion and the coastal income bonus, Phaeacia tends to be a fairly rich nation normally. With our scales, we're adding another flat 20% to that income, and ensuring our provinces grow and scale over time. This is going to give us a huge amount of money - we just need to make sure we have good answers ready for conflicts, since we won't be able to rely as heavily on our troops. Big dominion also helps our scales spread more effectively, which is something we want both for dark vessels as well as to spread our awesome scales. Finally, we're also taking our PG as imprisoned. This gives us a huge point bonus - +350! - buuut, it also means our PG isn't actually going to be available until around 3 years into the game - right around 36 turns. Since his main utility is to give us great income and some later game utility we don't really *need* him right away, but it does mean we're going to have very few options early on. Since Phaeacia typically has an island start, we're not all that worried about being rushed. Even with our kinda weird start this game, rushing us wouldn't be feasible due to the throne blocking off our area. This wound up a little longer than I thought, so we'll take a look at Phaeacia's actual units and commanders in a future update. DarthRoblox fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Apr 15, 2024 |
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Apr 15, 2024 04:54
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Thank you for doing this and good luck! I don't have time to get into Dom6 but I always love a screenshot LP of a game!
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Apr 15, 2024 06:09
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There actually is one indie troop type that's become a LOT more common in Dominions 6, is dirt cheap and massable, and actually good to recruit in basically all circumstances - Zotz. Turns out that being a super cheap flying troop is actually really good for expanding (or against players not guarding their back line) - this was extremely limited in 5, since they were only a possibility in the already rare cave province, but here they're generally all over the place underground. This also means that getting into death is really easy for anyone who can get into the cave layer, because indie Zotz can have a D1 mage available for recruitment. Outside that, you're basically just gambling on finding something that's both useful to your nation specifically AND in a province where you can actually recruit in decent quantities. Both of these are always chancy things in an actual game of Dominions. The various amazons all have a sacred troop, which can potentially be an interesting addition to your forces but it's very much dependent on whether you both have a good bless AND it's one that actually works with them. On the non-sacred side, Cynocephalians and LIzard Warriors are both hard hitting indies (that don't have barbarian issues), but both are relatively rare and - for cynos in particular - aren't exactly cheap or easy to mass either.
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Apr 15, 2024 06:10
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One thing I enjoy about Dominions is how it doesn't stick to a faction = historical counterpart formula. Through the three ages the various societies/races/cultures change and fragment and intermix. From the blurb, Phaeacia is an unholy mix of EA Berytos, Arcoscephale and Mekone, which roughly represent Carthage, Athens, Sparta, and then there's the Colossi who are from Great Zimbabwe or something. The Dominions setting is truly a fascinating world of a hundred nations, and when Pretenders cast globals that kill off the entire population or drown the world in horrors I'm sure they'll shed a few tears for the common man 
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Apr 15, 2024 06:24
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Dominions is about how the pretender gods are doomed to become monstrous and grind the storied nations, cultures and peoples of the world beneath their heels to achieve their objectives or stop others from doing the same. Meanwhile in Conquest of Elysium a pretender god would likely be a blessing, and would probably do something about the giant ants.
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Apr 16, 2024 01:45
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SIGSEGV posted:Dominions is about how the pretender gods are doomed to become monstrous and grind the storied nations, cultures and peoples of the world beneath their heels to achieve their objectives or stop others from doing the same. I mean, if *I* don't summon perpetual darkness and wrack the world with storms then someone else (cough bats cough) is just going to steal the sun and freeze the oceans, so really it's a necessary kind of evil, you see? After all, I'll have plenty of time to put things back together after I've ascended, right?
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Apr 16, 2024 05:13
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Turn 4 Back to the action. We're going to do one more turn like this, and then probably fast forward a bit and just hit the highlights for a bit - early expansion tends to be fairly samey turn to turn, with occasional bursts of excitement. Getting ahead of myself though - let's take a look at turn 4. First, up: We manage to recruit Ferrus. He comes with the slightly-less useful E2S3 paths instead of the E3S2 he can roll, but that's still OK - we're going to try to hang onto him for quite a while. For now, he's going to add to our so-far lacking research pool. We'd like to get two levels in evocation sooner rather than later, since it makes our storm captains much more effective than they currently are. In more exciting happenings, a fight! We moved in to take a province of barbarians this turn, with two storm captains and around 30 light colossi. Let's see how things go. Our lines look similar to the first fight, if now bulked out nicely with our new friends. The enemy is arrayed similarly, in a loose skirmish formation. This would protect them from missiles, but by the time they get to us those lines are going to condense - so, eh. Our troops throw their javelins, but the barbarians close the gap fast. Javelin troops are nice, because the ones in the back rows will keep throwing even as the front lines are engaged in melee. Accuracy in dominions is a whole topic, but generally the closer the better, so these javelins are doing a lot of damage After a bit, we manage to rout the top half of the barbarians. Independents are often set up as multiple squads, and each squad has their own morale/rout check. With the rout, the units on top are able to wrap down and envelop the remaining barbs. Despite this, the bottom pack hangs on for quite a while longer, smashing us up pretty good. Eventually though, we break their resolve and they too run off. This was definitely a costlier fight for us - barbarians really don't play around. I think in the actual game, we did a bit better with fewer losses. Either way, we're now the proud owners of an additional province. With our scout advanced, we can see the far side of the throne. We're not on an island, but the next province is a town. Towns are a province type that tends to have a lot of income, which we like, but also have more substantial defenders, up to and including knights or heavy cavalry. It's going to be a bit before we work up to taking this - the horse tribe and bone tribe are softer targets for us right now. We can also now see our first player nation! Down off the coast, we can see the friendly folk of Ys. Ys is a bit of a hybrid nation, with their troops able to transform themselves to have legs on dry land and fins underwater. Thematically, they're basically underwater elves, and have fairly beefy, glamoured shock cavalry. For now, they're likely busy with the ocean so we'll go ahead and let them be - UW and land nations often don't interact early on. If we do though, these guys are a threat - they can seamlessly transform into normal (well, magic, but) horse cavalry, making them more of a hybrid than a true UW nation. With a ton of ocean to expand into and another hostile UW player in the game, surely they won't bother us, right? Our next target is going to be the horse cav province. We're now up to 3 storm captains and around 40 light colossi, which should be enough to hit critical mass. Back home, we're going to switch over to recruiting a weaver. Weavers are one of our workhorse mages. They're pretty great all around, having good path availability across glamor/water/air/earth as well as guaranteed astral. In dominions, when you see a recruitable mage with 1S, it basically screams "communion". Communions are a large topic, but they basically let you slave some of your mages to designated leaders, empowering their magic paths and dividing spell casting fatigue among the group. They're also a fantastic way to gently caress up and get all your mages killed, making them tricky to use effectively. For now, they're a fairly cost effective researcher for us, and we want to get some RP flowing.
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Apr 16, 2024 05:18
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SIGSEGV posted:Dominions is about how the pretender gods are doomed to become monstrous and grind the storied nations, cultures and peoples of the world beneath their heels to achieve their objectives or stop others from doing the same. The endgame for several COE leaders is becoming a pretender god. Titans, demi liches, the mother of monsters are all on the table.
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Apr 16, 2024 06:51
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Oh nice. I tried to learn the game but I'm hopeless at it. Screenshot LP's though are pretty great. Can't wait to see where this one goes.
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Apr 16, 2024 20:53
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DarthRoblox posted:Ha, yea - that was a fun fight. "Major battle" is overselling it, but basically I was Piconye (a nation of hobbit people) squaring off against Atlantis (frog people). Atlantis had gotten together a number of golem thugs - in Dominions terms, a "thug" is a single unit that's intended to take on moderate amounts of units by itself. I had a battle like that back in Dominions 5, against Arcvasti as Arcoscephale while I was Mictlan. I bumped into one of his golems he'd been raiding me with and put up Howl, which didn't kill the golem, but kept him buried in dogs until turn 100 hit. In Dom 5, on Turn 100, the attackers would start routing(at 150, defenders would rout, 200 everyone would just get deleted off the battlefield, to prevent one odd thing from hardlocking the entire game). But since golems are mindless magical units, when they rout, they don't just run away, instead they melt. So Howl ended up killing him indirectly.
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Apr 19, 2024 02:51
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There's something special about just drowning a far superior enemy in piles of completely trash units until they're ground down into a fine powder. An analogy for life, maybe...
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Apr 19, 2024 04:45
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Turns 5-9 We're going to fast forward a little bit here, and just hit the high points. It's a bit hard to recreate fights from this stage in the game, and nothing all that exciting happens aside from wiping out a bunch of indies. So instead - recap time! First up, let's take a look at the net change in our provinces over these 5 turns We're unfortunately limited to about 1 province per turn through turn 9. This is... pretty bad, as a general guideline you really want to be getting close to 18-20 provinces by the end of year 1 to be having a "good" expansion (turn 12). We're at 8, with a path to get maaaaybe 2 more. It's not that we've lost any big fights, but the map structure had us going up our little peninsula against fairly tough indies, and then by the time we finally got vision to sail at the mainland it's already been fully claimed by the multiple new human nations we can see. The indies are largely variants of what we've already seen - horse tribe, bone tribe, some heavy cavalry and standard human troops. We take some minimal losses, but nothing worth recreating. Let's take a quick look at our new neighbors, and some brief thoughts on what we know about them so far. First up, Machaka Dominions 6 Manual posted:Machaka, Lion Kings In game terms, Machaka seems to be relying heavily on their black hunter sacreds with a fire shield bless. We haven't actually seen this in game, but out-of-game chatter suggests that they had a nasty bump with a neighbor and the spider sacreds did a lot of damage. (A bump is when two player nations move into an indie province on the same turn - one army will fight the indies first, and then the winner of that fight goes on to fight the other nation's army.) Fire shield and big beefy sacreds with webs isn't great for us right now; so we're going to try and be friends here. Dominions 6 Manual posted:Phlegra, Deformed Giants Phlegra has some shared mythology with us - some of the Mekone Gigantes fled to an island off Phaeacia and married a Phaeacian queen, while others descended and became the deformed giants of Phlegra. Phlegra has mostly fairly poor troops, with a huge exception in their Tyrants and Gigante Warriors. We'll look at these properly later, but they're very strong, but also very expensive and limited availability bruisers. We also caught a glance of Phlegra's PG crushing some indies: The great mother is a pretty good expander chassis - lots of health, built in health regen, and trample. She doesn't really do much damage attacking, but when you can just squish things underfoot who cares? She's equipped with blacksteel fullplate and self-buffing with protection spells, making her quite hard to damage at all. Fairly nasty this early on, but will struggle to kill quickly against our larger, healthier troops. Phlegra's bless is nothing special - nothing that helps their troops, with recuperation there to help the PG recover from damage. In fact, Phlegra doesn't *have* any sacreds which is fairly unique, so the low emphasis on the bless makes sense. Dominions 6 Manual posted:T'ien Ch'i, Imperial Bureaucracy T'ien Ch'i is our final neighbor at this point, a bit further down the coast. They're one of the human nations, meaning they have fairly troop but also fairly squishy troops, good mages, and some fairly good sacred cav. We also manage to see their PG chowing down on a different set of indies: The White Tiger of the West is also a good expander - lots of attacks and fear is a potent combo. We can also see evidence of their bless, since this chassis isn't normally ethereal: Now this, this is a much more potent and troop oriented bless. Ethereal means that 75% of non-magical attacks will simply phase through the unit, while +5 natural protection makes all of their sacred units much tougher to kill. Now, we haven't actually taken a look at *our* sacreds yet, but we're starting to recruit some at this point so let's take a quick look: The Orichalcum Guard are Phaeacia's sacred troop, and they're actually very solid all around. They're fairly pricey, at 40 gold a pop, but for that expense you get a 24hp troop with good stats, decent armor, and a magic weapon. Magic weapons are very nice to have in some circumstances - such as when your opponent has gone for an ethereal bless! This troop alone means that T'ien's bless is mostly negated, since the base damage and magic nature of the swords is enough to get through both aspects. Now, the other downside of the Guard is that they're very resource-intensive, and your capital being either an island or coastal often limits resources to the point where you can only ever get 3 or maybe 4 a turn. If I haven't mentioned, sacreds are generally only recruitable from your capital instead of any forted province. However, since we went so scales-heavy we can actually recruit a full complement of these guys, up to our holy point limit (your holy points are limited by the max strength of your dominion - another reason PG design is important). Our bless doesn't help them much, but we can get enough they'll actually be a really solid elite troop for us. --- So - recap of our position. We're at 8 provinces on turn 9, and we're effectively out of provinces to take. This is quite bad - we can't stay this size or we're going to be limited to being a rump state and not really competitive in the broader game. We might not die for a while, since we're on an annoying little spit of land, but it's unlikely we'd have any relevance to the global picture. We've managed to start construction on two forts on turns 5 & 8, but we don't really want to shove more in the space we have available. That more or less forces a decision on us - we need to do something I normally avoid, and pick a very early fight. Declaring war on another player in year 0 is typically a bad idea since it tends to cripple both sides, while everyone else continues expanding into indies and making headway on research. For our situation though, we don't have much choice. We want to pick a fight that we can win quickly and decisively. After looking at our neighbors, I like the way we stack up against Phlegra the most. We know that Phlegra lost an expansion party to Machaka from discord chatter earlier on, so are down in strength right now. I also think that our troops stack up well against the Phlegran elites, particularly with artillery support from our captains. The Great Mother is potentially a bit of a problem, but I think it's a solvable one. We'll go over the invasion + war plan next turn, but for now we're moving pretty much everything we have into place to prep a naval invasion in the near future. DarthRoblox fucked around with this message at 05:02 on Apr 19, 2024 |
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Apr 19, 2024 04:49
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PurpleXVI posted:I had a battle like that back in Dominions 5, against Arcvasti as Arcoscephale while I was Mictlan. I bumped into one of his golems he'd been raiding me with and put up Howl, which didn't kill the golem, but kept him buried in dogs until turn 100 hit. In Dom 5, on Turn 100, the attackers would start routing(at 150, defenders would rout, 200 everyone would just get deleted off the battlefield, to prevent one odd thing from hardlocking the entire game). But since golems are mindless magical units, when they rout, they don't just run away, instead they melt. So Howl ended up killing him indirectly. This was a real problem with mindless thugs in Dom5, yeah. In Dom6 I think it's less of an issue because the rout timer is longer, and most thugs have trouble surviving the turn 100 threshold, which now dispels all of their buffs(including the bless!). With that, and golems going down a research level to Construction 6, perhaps it is time for golem thugs once again...
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Apr 19, 2024 06:40
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DarthRoblox posted:We're unfortunately limited to about 1 province per turn through turn 9. This is... pretty bad, as a general guideline you really want to be getting close to 18-20 provinces by the end of year 1 to be having a "good" expansion (turn 12). We're at 8, with a path to get maaaaybe 2 more. It's not that we've lost any big fights, but the map structure had us going up our little peninsula against fairly tough indies, and then by the time we finally got vision to sail at the mainland it's already been fully claimed by the multiple new human nations we can see. The indies are largely variants of what we've already seen - horse tribe, bone tribe, some heavy cavalry and standard human troops. We take some minimal losses, but nothing worth recreating. I'd disagree a bit with this assessment, but it depends a lot on your map. On most of the ones traditionally used by the Ruby Discord, if everyone has 12 provinces by turn 12, then all non-throne provinces are gonna be filled out, more or less. One province per turn is about what you can reasonably expect because you might run into "dead ends"(advancing just means dead expanders due to powerful indies or starting a year 0 hellwar due to encountering someone else's expansion) or want to hold off a turn of expansion to buff up your expander with some research or your expansion troops with reinforcements(indie fights are very rarely 1:1 unit exchanges, usually you either lose only a handful or you lose EVERYTHING, so being sure to be on the right side of that seesaw is important). Province value is also a big deal, getting three wastelands(unless they have good sites or throne access or some such) is worth far less than getting a 20k pop farmland province. So I think strict maths of "if you don't have 20 provinces by turn 12, you're behind" shouldn't be in mind, it'll just lead to losing IRL morale. Aiming for 12 by turn 12 is far more realistic in most cases. Arcvasti posted:This was a real problem with mindless thugs in Dom5, yeah. In Dom6 I think it's less of an issue because the rout timer is longer, and most thugs have trouble surviving the turn 100 threshold, which now dispels all of their buffs(including the bless!). With that, and golems going down a research level to Construction 6, perhaps it is time for golem thugs once again... Please test them in a game I'm not in, I'm tired of you kicking my rear end.
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Apr 19, 2024 12:31
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PurpleXVI posted:I'd disagree a bit with this assessment, but it depends a lot on your map. On most of the ones traditionally used by the Ruby Discord, if everyone has 12 provinces by turn 12, then all non-throne provinces are gonna be filled out, more or less. One province per turn is about what you can reasonably expect because you might run into "dead ends"(advancing just means dead expanders due to powerful indies or starting a year 0 hellwar due to encountering someone else's expansion) or want to hold off a turn of expansion to buff up your expander with some research or your expansion troops with reinforcements(indie fights are very rarely 1:1 unit exchanges, usually you either lose only a handful or you lose EVERYTHING, so being sure to be on the right side of that seesaw is important). Yea - the bigger problem I was seeing is that there was nowhere else to go at turn 9, other than taking the throne nearby. 8 provinces isn't a lot to go off of long-term and Phaeacia has a pretty soft mid-game. Once lightning bolt comes online you get a big power spike if you're investing in captains, as we'll see, but then you've got a gap until the bigger spells and communions come online. Your non-sacreds start to fall off against most player armies pretty quickly until you can get some buffs online.
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Apr 19, 2024 14:41
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I think of "N provinces by turn X" as a proxy for general expansion strength rather than an actual accounting. If your setup is capable of fast expansion, it could manifest as actual N provinces, or as taking a difficult province in an important location that otherwise must be skipped, or having a strong intact expansion group ready to invade someone else, or simply as stability (less likely to lose fights against indies). The last one is probably most important, because early expansion failures seem a lot more common than I would have expected from reading older LPs. I'm not sure if that's because Dominions 6 has larger independent armies, or because players are just more conservative in LP games 
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Apr 19, 2024 15:11
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Redmark posted:I think of "N provinces by turn X" as a proxy for general expansion strength rather than an actual accounting. If your setup is capable of fast expansion, it could manifest as actual N provinces, or as taking a difficult province in an important location that otherwise must be skipped, or having a strong intact expansion group ready to invade someone else, or simply as stability (less likely to lose fights against indies). One thing is indie numbers are just generally up across the board(but provinces are also generally richer and scales are rewarded more, so you can bulk up your own forces faster, too), the second is some changes to mechanics that have subtle effects. For instance, large chaff armies(see, for instance, MA Ermor's freespawn) used to do way more work, but now they get way more effortlessly bodied by high-quality elites. The attacks of sacred units' mounts also used to not get bless effects, but most mounted sacreds now also have sacred mounts that get bless boosts, making sacred cavalry a good deal scarier. There's also the Cave Layer, which... we don't go to the Cave Layer. It's where all the scary poo poo lives.
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Apr 19, 2024 20:13
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First time I've heard wormbros be called scary
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Apr 19, 2024 21:04
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