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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). It's very much the latter. Actual unit stats and base mechanics haven't really changed much from 5, so significantly increased indie sizes have had notable knockon effects. Lower prot but killy expander PGs are a big one, as where previously they might break a province's defenders in short order, but with the larger numbers they don't actually break and instead just stab it to death. Similar issues with many varieties of minimum size expansion parties, where there's just too many indies to reliably clear as before. Mount changes have also hurt a number of armies, particularly in EA, because their elite mounted troops give the horses basically no armor and generally notably lower defensive stats, so you end up with them stabbed out from below the rider. Lesser issue in later ages, as most armies that care about cavalry start picking up very heavy barding, but even there some elites have been affected (TC and Jomon are notable ones here, as they're still not using much armor even in LA).
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Apr 20, 2024 01:00
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I admit to knowing gently caress all about the mechanics of this game, but I love reading these threads and I thank you for sharing this one with us. Now I'm going to sit back and wait for "A Dire Portent' or 4 to show up.
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Apr 20, 2024 03:16
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Fearless_Decoy posted:I admit to knowing gently caress all about the mechanics of this game, but I love reading these threads and I thank you for sharing this one with us. Thanks for checking it out! You might be waiting a bit, this has been a very globals-light game through the early stages. I've found globals are fairly slow to deploy in the newbie/newbad games, likely because no one really knows what they're doing and doesn't have a research plan more than 2 or 3 turns in advance 
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Apr 21, 2024 00:42
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gently caress, you guys had a plan?
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Apr 21, 2024 01:33
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I have, at best, a vague notion of a plan in my games. It also feels weird reading an LP about a game I'm actively engaging in! Especially since it'll probably be quite a bit still before anything I've been doing becomes relevant to the LP.
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Apr 21, 2024 02:16
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Turn 10 To war! ... Of course, to go to war we should probably have a plan. At our disposal, we have 3 storm captains, around 20 heavy colossi, 75 light colossi, and 6 Orichalcum guard in place to attack next turn, and another captain with 12 guard and 35 troops who can reinforce the turn after. Per turn, we can produce a captain, 6 guard and around 20 assorted other troops. We also have a palisade finishing next turn, which allows us to recruit another 15-20 lights and an extra storm captain every 2 turns. Our forces are mostly focused where our peninsula meets the mainland, up against Phlegra's holdings. We have a good idea of where their god is likely to be, based on the single remaining coastal indie province - I suspect they're going to be taking it next turn based on our scout report. So, the war plan will be something like this: - Step 1 - launch initial attacks with moderate forces against 3 of Phlegra's provinces. This makes it hard for them to know where to send reinforcements, having to bet on our next actions. - Step 2 - try to catch the PG in a trap by using our superior mobility to concentrate troops unexpectedly, turning what seems like a light raid into a large army. - Step 3 - meanwhile, send a secondary force around the far side of their capital, to claim lands and threaten territory if the PG trap fails. - Step 4 - If everything works out, combine our two groups into a large attack on the capital. Phlegra is very cap-dependent for their scariest troops, and this early on they don't have many or maybe any secondary forts to build up a secondary army. For our initial squads, each will be set up something like this: A pretty basic formation - heavies and guards forming a line up front, lights off to the side with order to throw javelins and then hopefully roll up along the flank. For now, the captain will just sit in the back and not do much. --- In terms of what we need to worry about from Phlegra, aside from Big Momma who we covered above, there's also these guys: The tyrant in particular is a pseudo-army killer all on his own. In fact, you're encouraged to always have him out fighting because he has a big research malus and causes unrest just by existing in a province. He has a lot of magic paths, but they're mostly for self-buffing since he's also a berserker, and berserk units don't case spells. These guys can become right terrors with enough research, but since we're still in year 0 I'm hoping he can at most lightly buff his protection. The Gigantes are basically the troop version of the tyrant. They can't cast any spells, like all troops, but they otherwise have a boatload of hp, decent protection, and tons of damage. They're still possible to swarm down, but they're devastating in sufficient number. From what we've seen from scouts, it looks like these two are the main troops Phlegra's player has been recruiting. I think that we actually stack up really well here - our guard do high enough damage to cut through, though lesser troops will struggle, and the lights have good enough defense that they'll only get hit on around half of their attacks. We might struggle a bit to actually kill them with melee, but we don't really have to - we're about two turns from unlocking lightning bolt on all of our captains. Lightning bolt is a real workhorse of a spell - high damage, ignores armor, low fatigue cost, and highly accurate. It's really all you can ask for from a level 2 spell, and our captains are going to be casting a ton of it as soon as it's unlocked. With this, we should be able to tie up the tyrants and gigantes with our troops while our captains spam lightning bolts until they're fried. The same principle will apply to the PG - get her bogged down in masses of troops, and use mass lightning to outpace her health regen. Hopefully. With that, we're now fully committed to this invasion - this is clearly a war declaration, so we can expect Phlegra's player to immediately respond next turn. Hopefully this attack catches them off guard enough to make some mistakes early on, since I think there's a lot they can do to counter us if we give them a chance. Out of the immediate game context I feel a bit bad about this move since I'd been chatting a bit with Phlegra's player earlier on, but dominions tends to be a pretty cut throat game - only one god can claim the title of pantokrator, after all. This is also the last turn where I don't have backups, so from here on out there will be less drawing squiggles on maps and more actual battle screenshots.
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Apr 21, 2024 02:37
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IthilionTheBrave posted:I have, at best, a vague notion of a plan in my games. That must be an interesting experience - I don't think I'll even see the edges of your territory for another, like, dozen turns and I have no idea how your early game went at all. Getting a single perspective in a game like this is definitely warping; especially since I started in such a weird little out of the way part of the map. We're only getting the full experience of my perspective, and partial views of the other ~3 neighbors that I can see at this point. That's a full 2/3 of the game that hasn't been covered at all so far.
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Apr 21, 2024 02:39
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DarthRoblox posted:The tyrant in particular is a pseudo-army killer all on his own. In fact, you're encouraged to always have him out fighting because he has a big research malus and causes unrest just by existing in a province. He has a lot of magic paths, but they're mostly for self-buffing since he's also a berserker, and berserk units don't case spells. These guys can become right terrors with enough research, but since we're still in year 0 I'm hoping he can at most lightly buff his protection. Worth noting is that he's a Berserker but not Berserking. Some units are always Berserk, meaning they start fights that way and rush right at the enemy, but ordinary Berserkers like this fella only Berserk once they get hit, so they have some turns to self-buff before the real scrum starts, and can even work as proper mages as long as they don't get hit by an errant arrow that makes them froth at the mouth. Also God, what a starting position. Dom 6 seems to love creating these map "dead ends" and starting people in them when you use the built-in map gen. I can't wait until the Ruby Discord builds up a decent library of non-hosed maps to use regularly.
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Apr 21, 2024 10:27
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PurpleXVI posted:Also God, what a starting position. Dom 6 seems to love creating these map "dead ends" and starting people in them when you use the built-in map gen. I can't wait until the Ruby Discord builds up a decent library of non-hosed maps to use regularly. I've got a start almost exactly like this in another game except I've had even less room to grow. If I'm able to turn things around I might try to LP it, but as of right now it's up in the air how long I'll last.
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Apr 21, 2024 11:38
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Yea - if i wasn't this exact nation this would be a much worse position, since even other nations with sailing would have to slowly walk their capital mages to the mainland over like 3 turns to join any fights unless you're willing to burn gems to teleport or whatever. Once I establish a toehold with some dominion I can get over the mainland fairly easily.
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Apr 21, 2024 12:49
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Excited to see where this war goes, this is where all my previous (dom 3) games would fall apart.
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Apr 22, 2024 02:39
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DarthRoblox posted:Yea - if i wasn't this exact nation this would be a much worse position, since even other nations with sailing would have to slowly walk their capital mages to the mainland over like 3 turns to join any fights unless you're willing to burn gems to teleport or whatever. Once I establish a toehold with some dominion I can get over the mainland fairly easily. This will probably get explained imminently but I'm curious how you'll get dominion candles for the national sailing. From the map in this post, one of the planned landing zones is far from your border with Phlegra, and the prophet is a non-stealthy commander. Unless I'm misunderstanding how Dark Vessels works. Also, sailing is a tremendously powerful strategic ability but I've never understood exactly how it works with map movement costs. Last I asked someone said it allows you to move through one underwater province for free, but in my experience it seems to do more than that (the destination has to be really far to be too far to sail to).
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Apr 22, 2024 04:03
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Redmark posted:This will probably get explained imminently but I'm curious how you'll get dominion candles for the national sailing. From the map in this post, one of the planned landing zones is far from your border with Phlegra, and the prophet is a non-stealthy commander. Unless I'm misunderstanding how Dark Vessels works. It's basically you get to move through 2 ocean province connections from what I've seen, so land -> water -> water -> land is the furthest you can go. Since ocean provinces tend to be quite large and well connected compared to land provinces, this can wind up being 5+ provinces along the coast in some cases. It might not always be 2 provinces; it's a little unclear but it seems consistent to me so far. It's true that I need friendly dominion on both sides for dark sails, but one of the reasons I like storm captains so much is that they can sail all the time with troops up to size 5 (all of our guys right now). So, the plan is to basically make a beachhead with the captains and then bring over a phaecian priest or our prophet (who can also sail naturally - I should probably go over our other recruitables soon...) to build up friendly dominion so the rest of our mages can come too. This early on though, the troops are doing almost all the fighting - our non-captain mages aren't super useful since we're only just about to get Evo 2 and have nothing else. DarthRoblox fucked around with this message at 04:38 on Apr 22, 2024 |
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Apr 22, 2024 04:33
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Ah so you can sail if you have dominion OR a leader who can take you, you don’t need both.
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Apr 22, 2024 04:37
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Right - the ability to sail is determined by the commander; units under their command don't need a specific ability. Sailing has two components, max unit size and max ship size. Max unit size relates to the size element of the unit stats - the colossi are all size 4 and the captains can sail units up to size 5, so we're all good there. On the other hand, our human Phaeacian captains can only sail units up to size 3, which means only our lovely human infantry - the Colossi are too big for the boats, I guess. Max ship size is the sum total of all of the units under a commander. For leaders who have the specific sailing ability it's usually 999, which would be 250 Colossi - way more than a single captain can lead, anyways. This is a little more relevant when the sailing ability is granted instead of natural, like if a leader equips the pocket ship item: This ship can sail really big units up to size 7, but only 600 total size points. So, for our Colossi that would be 150 - still more than the captains can command, but there's various ways to get higher totals. Dark sails then is a special condition for Phaeacia, which grants the sailing ability to ALL of our commanders, even random independents we recruit. As far as I know there's no limits on unit size or total size points with the ability - the only restriction is the starting point and destination have to be in friendly dominion (though the ocean in between doesn't matter). Dominions is full of poo poo like this - this is a fairly detailed mechanic that applies to a handful of nations in the game. The vast majority of the time, no one can even make use of sailing, and there's a ton of other mechanics that are super specific to the flavor of a handful or even a single nation. I'll cover some of those as we get to them, we've got some fun nations in play this game. DarthRoblox fucked around with this message at 04:54 on Apr 22, 2024 |
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Apr 22, 2024 04:50
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Glad to see a dominion LP while it's in making. And with other player input on top of it. Can't wait to see how everything will go to hell and friendships get broken in a bloody fashion.
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Apr 22, 2024 19:54
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Turn 11 We're now officially into the turns where I have actual backups! Huzzah, and no more hacking things up in image editors to give a visual on what's going on. As mentioned before, at the start of each turn you get a set of messages telling you what happened over the month end. Let's take a look... OK, we see 3 fights that we expected, our scout caught a peek at Phlegra killing indies... and... Ys attacking us?!? what? Ys is attacking us on land - as mentioned, they're a kind of hybrid nation, with many of their troops having both a land and aquatic form. They brought a handful of their sacred knights (the blurry things at the top) and then a set of their more standard fishmen soldiers. On our side we have... fuckin' nothing. Literally 1 PD, because I've been running the budget at redline this whole time and couldn't spare the 30 or so gold to put half decent PD here. Oh. Also, our freakin' prophet is here because I was moving him up to support the invasion. This is fine. My prophet gives it a good try - priests of sufficient power can smite the enemy, and he manages to take down a commander and one of the sacreds - but it's not enough and he's cut down. Aside from losing our prophet, which is a pain since we can't declare another for a few months, this is also one of the provinces where I had a fort going up. A fort costs 1,000 gold and takes 6 months to build, and if at any point in that process you lose the province then you lose both the gold and any progress made on the fort. Oof. For reference, our monthly income is currently ~2k or so. The bigger loss is the turn economy though - the fort was over half done, so this is a big setback since forts are how you get more mages (generally speaking). My thoughts initially turn to revenge - we can evict this quantity of troops from our land very easily and Ys is quite small otherwise. However, while Ys can get at us pretty easily it's much harder for us to go into the water after them. We'd basically need to reprioritize research into construction to forge some water breathing items and would also need different spells, so realistically we couldn't counter invade for a dozen turns or so. In the meantime, they can attack any of our coastal provinces at will - especially because their sacreds are invisible on the strategic map. There's also the broader picture to consider - UW provinces tend to be pretty income poor, and we can't build forts underwater. On top of that, another issue is that's there's another UW nation in the game: R'lyeh. R'lyeh is basically the Cthulu mythos as a nation and can be very nasty if allowed to grow unchecked. So, we'd wind up investing a ton of time and resources into fighting underwater when we're not suited to it, and would give the other actual UW nation a lot of room to expand and grow and then likely kick us out of the water. So, I set aside vengeance for a second and engaged in *shudder* diplomacy with Ys' player. It turns out, they were threatened by our fort going up since it was next to their capital. Normally, the "cap circle" of provinces around your capital is considered "yours", and another player encroaching on it is more or less a war declaration. In my case I really didn't have a choice, but UW and land provinces also don't interact - forts can't draw resources across the boundary and Ys' player wasn't aware of that. Between the misunderstanding and the broader strategy, I decide to let Ys both keep the province as well as sell them the province next door. The hope is that this generates some goodwill and also gives them some momentum to go fight R'lyeh underwater instead of messing around on land. I don't think their chances are good since they only have a few provinces this far into the game, but I still think it's the best option. --- OK - surprise oceanic treachery aside our engagements against Phlegra go as expected. We only face small PD squads and lose a single light colossi across all three fights. We also get some important tactical info from watching Phlegra's PD fight - she's managed to pick up a limp in one of the indie fights. A limp is very bad for a trampler, since it makes them generate fatigue more quickly and move less per round. Tramping relies on high movement and generates fatigue, so this is quite bad for her killing ability. Phlegra's player did take recuperation as part of their bless so the great mother might lose the affliction over the end turn, but if it sticks around that's a big win for us. Each turn also tends to see a handful of random events. These can range pretty widely, from minor changes to population or scales, all the way up to an independent horde of vampires descending on your province. This is another area where scales plays a big role - many a player has been tempted by misfortune 3 only to have their labs mysteriously burn down, gems evaporate, and hordes of knights take very province they own. I won't generally be covering them unless they're interesting in some way, but as a quick example we got a pile of water gems from an event this turn, neat! --- So, with all the updates processed here's the plan for next turn. We can see the general picture - in particular, notice all the red arrows pointing at the coastal Phlegran province that's currently home to a Tyrant and a few gigantes. My wager here is that Phlegra will leave them where they are and move the PG to join them. They also might try to counter attack the province I just took. Either way, it's a good guess that I'd invade another coastal province, so consolidating forces and trying to surprise one of my squads is a solid plan. But - it's not going to be one of the small raiding squads moving into that province. We're moving a total of three storm captains with 115 total troops between them, 18 of which are Orichalcum guard. This is the majority of our strength at this point, so if this goes badly we could be in a lot of trouble. A big key to this plan is to move quickly and win decisive victories early on - a prolonged and costly war would put us well behind the curve in terms of power, if not get us killed more or less outright. There's one big hitch with this plan, and that's that the research for lightning bolt finishes *next* turn. Commanders can cast spells that finish over the end turn, but you can't script them to do so. That means that we're sending in our captains with only a precision buff scripted and otherwise they're free to cast whatever they want. Normally this would be exceptionally stupid since the AI for spells is... really bad, usually. However, since we have no other research done lightning bolt is pretty much the only spell that the captains can cast at all, so I'm hoping they choose to do so instead of trying to buff up all of the light colossi's accuracy or something. It's a big gamble, but with our position it's one I feel willing to wager on. DarthRoblox fucked around with this message at 03:51 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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Apr 23, 2024 03:45
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Hi, I'm Ys. This wasn't my main or even secondary objective at the time, DarthRoblox accurately summarized my confusion and inexperience, but take a gander at that province I invaded on the map and see if you can pick up on the major strategic advantage I managed to give myself without realizing it at first!
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Apr 23, 2024 16:45
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It's a shortcut to the other part of the sea that you can use because most (all?) your forces are amphibious with isn't necessarily the case with R'lyeh's troop selection.
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Apr 23, 2024 16:50
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SIGSEGV posted:It's a shortcut to the other part of the sea that you can use because most (all?) your forces are amphibious with isn't necessarily the case with R'lyeh's troop selection. MA Rl'yeh's troop and commander pool is basically entirely amphibious, so this isn't it. Other than just providing a quicker path to Rl'yeh-controlled territory (which goes both ways), I'm not really seeing it. Actually, I'm somewhat surprised they're not planning to backstab Phaecia at the earliest opportunity here, because Ys really, really wants coastal provinces (which is entirely what Phaecia's peninsula is), their troops are better on land, and they're notably weaker than Rl'yeh underwater. edit: For those not aware of how Ys works, all their best sacreds and commanders (Morvarc'hs) ride mounts that have a different shape on land. UW they've only got a very poor tail flipper attack. On land, they've got a notably better hoof attack... and an armor piercing fire attack that hits an entire square of troops. Lord Koth fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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Apr 23, 2024 17:21
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DarthRoblox posted:But - it's not going to be one of the small raiding squads moving into that province. We're moving a total of three storm captains with 115 total troops between them, 18 of which are Orichalcum guard. This is the majority of our strength at this point, so if this goes badly we could be in a lot of trouble. A big key to this plan is to move quickly and win decisive victories early on - a prolonged and costly war would put us well behind the curve in terms of power, if not get us killed more or less outright. This is why I prefer not to fight wars at all. Fighting wars means you risk resources to gain resources, simply getting paid off by other players or extorting them means you get resources for not risking resources. Lord Koth posted:MA Rl'yeh's troop and commander pool is basically entirely amphibious, so this isn't it. Other than just providing a quicker path to Rl'yeh-controlled territory (which goes both ways), I'm not really seeing it. Actually, I'm somewhat surprised they're not planning to backstab Phaecia at the earliest opportunity here, because Ys really, really wants coastal provinces (which is entirely what Phaecia's peninsula is), their troops are better on land, and they're notably weaker than Rl'yeh underwater. As an important note, MA and LA R'lyeh's troops and commanders are almost entirely amphibious... except for their only good recruitables, crab hybrids, while everything else they have is more or less purely dogshit chaff. Crab hybrids are sadly aquatic, and they're the only troops they have that reliably do anything other than routing and getting murdered by merrows or something.
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Apr 23, 2024 17:42
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Yea you can see the remnants of the fire breath deleting some militia in the battle screenshot. For the reasons noted in the update I really didn’t want an actual fight with Ys right now, transforming sea elves would be enormously annoying to fight and I’d get basically no benefit from it either. The fire resistance on my sacreds and their general toughness would probably do fine against the morvachs in sufficient quantity, but it’s not a theory I wanted to thoroughly test NOTE FOR CURRENT PLAYERS: These statements do not necessarily pertain to the current stage of the game in progress 
DarthRoblox fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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Apr 23, 2024 17:45
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PurpleXVI posted:This is why I prefer not to fight wars at all. Fighting wars means you risk resources to gain resources, simply getting paid off by other players or extorting them means you get resources for not risking resources. ...I have never, EVER seen Meteorite Guard called dogshit crap before. Good HP, high prot, relatively cheap slaves that come with a very high damage magical attack. And once they get rolling MA has the gold to actually make a bunch of Illithids to back up their frontline too.
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Apr 23, 2024 17:52
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Lord Koth posted:...I have never, EVER seen Meteorite Guard called dogshit crap before. Good HP, high prot, relatively cheap slaves that come with a very high damage magical attack. And once they get rolling MA has the gold to actually make a bunch of Illithids to back up their frontline too. Conversely I've never seen them win a fight. Maybe the changes for Dom 6 improved them, but in Dom 5 all of the pokey dude infantry afforded to MA and LA R'lyeh were incredibly bad. My theory is that it's a combination of poor morale and attack/def skills that were just SLIGHTLY below average, meaning that even against the lion tribe of the sea they had a good chance of whiffing most of their attacks and running away the moment one of them had a stubbed toe.
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Apr 23, 2024 18:01
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PurpleXVI posted:Conversely I've never seen them win a fight. Maybe the changes for Dom 6 improved them, but in Dom 5 all of the pokey dude infantry afforded to MA and LA R'lyeh were incredibly bad. My theory is that it's a combination of poor morale and attack/def skills that were just SLIGHTLY below average, meaning that even against the lion tribe of the sea they had a good chance of whiffing most of their attacks and running away the moment one of them had a stubbed toe. Aren’t they better than average in almost all aspects? 12 morale up to 14 if you stick them on an illithid lord commander, 11 atk. They have equal or better stats than crab hybrids in everything but HP, combat speed, and number of attacks and cost a third as much gold. The resources can be kinda tough, but I don’t see the crab advantages otherwise.
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Apr 23, 2024 18:06
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PurpleXVI posted:Conversely I've never seen them win a fight. Maybe the changes for Dom 6 improved them, but in Dom 5 all of the pokey dude infantry afforded to MA and LA R'lyeh were incredibly bad. My theory is that it's a combination of poor morale and attack/def skills that were just SLIGHTLY below average, meaning that even against the lion tribe of the sea they had a good chance of whiffing most of their attacks and running away the moment one of them had a stubbed toe. I always loved them in Dom 5, have yet to play R'lyeh in Dom 6 but give me some guard in front of a pile of illithid in 5 and I am raiding the surface in force no problem.
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Apr 23, 2024 22:01
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Turn 12 Big turn coming up here - do we get the fight we were looking for? First up, nothing too surprising in the messages - two fights in the provinces we were expecting and Ys claiming the other province they bought off of us. Let's jump straight in to our big stack's fight. On our side, a big line of heavies and guard backed by an even larger line of lights. On the enemy side... Yep! Both the PG and the tyrant are here as we were hoping for. Importantly, the PG still has the limp as well - that's going to severely limit her ability to actually fight us; great news. The battle starts fairly slowly - some light buffs to increase the PG's protection as well as an air shield for the tyrant, to protect him from most missiles. We buff up precision, and our archers and light colossi pretty quickly delete the tribal PD squad that comes running at us. Because Phlegra's god is so slow with the limp, both she and the tyrant reach our lines are roughly the same time. We pretty quickly envelop the gigantes with our guard and heavies, while the god heads more for the lights. Our captains don't let us down and immediately start bolting the gigantes - lightning bolt has a secondary effect of potentially stunning anyone it hits for a combat round, so the gigantes wind up spending a lot of time shocked during the fight. While, as predicted, our troops aren't doing a whole lot of damage, the lightning keeps raining down and starts taking out some of the gigantes. We lose a few troops to the big spears, but we have a lot more reserves. It takes a few rounds, but we eventually kill off all the gigantes - leaving just the PG. We pretty quickly get her completely surrounded and are putting out some decent hits but... She regens for 25 hp a round. We can *sometimes* put out more than 25 hp in damage, but not 100% consistently. We're slowing moving the damage floor up, but will it be enough? After 30 or so rounds, we manage to knock her hp down to the point that it triggers the hp loss rout. I haven't talked about routing much, but there's basically two kinds - unit/squad routing, where squads roll against their morale value when bad things happen to them and run away if they fail, and hp routing. HP routing occurs when one of the sides in the battle has lost 75% of the summed HP they started the battle with. There's some details that aren't important here, but basically what happened is we got the PG down low enough to hit under that 75% limit, causing her to instantly rout. We're now basically on a timer. The PG is going to sloooowly walk her way back to the edge of the battlefield, and if she reaches it then she gets to flee to a neighboring province and live to fight another day. We'd really like that not to happen, so it's up to our guys to stack enough damage to bring her down. Note the round counter in the top right - this is round 35. This is round 50... 65.... ....75..... And then finally, on round 81 and 4 squares from the edge of the battlefield, we finally manage to land the finishing blow and kill her off for good. Close! With the PG dead, the fight comes to an end. The full summary of the fight reveals that we did lose a fair amount - about 20% of our force, give or take. However, I'll trade that any day for a PG kill and taking out the tyrant+gigantes - it's a trade that's well worth it. We've seen from scouts that Phlegra has another tyrant or two running around, but we saw how badly they got trashed by lightning bolts and we have enough troops around that even without magic we'd still be able to take them on. Now that Phlegra's god is dead, we're moving both the army that just fought as well as the squad that looped around to the north straight onto Phlegra's capital. The capital is where all of Phlegra's scary stuff comes from, so even though actually *taking* the capital would be fairly hard, we can lay siege to it and prevent them from recruiting anything out of it as long as we're there. Given what we've seen of Phlegra's forces, I very much doubt they can sally out and kick us off. Unless something goes wildly wrong here, this is kinda game over for Phlegra. Sometimes it's possible to pull back and regroup since capitals are quite tough to actually capture, especially this early, but Phlegra just doesn't have any reserves. We can see their full extent of provinces and they don't have any other forts, so recruiting enough stuff to reclaim their capital would take quite a while. Meanwhile, we can stream in reinforcements pretty much continuously, pushing the balance of power even further in our direction. As far as ways this war could've gone, this was the ideal case for us - minimal losses, quick decisive tactical victory. At this point, we need to push to try and claim as much as we can and really seal the overall strategic victory before anything has a chance to go wrong. Taking a look at the broader strategic picture, we're moving up some more reinforcements from our capital - they'll likely start taking some of Phlegra's coastal provinces. We also see R'lyeh pop up off the coast with plenty of their illithids - I really hope they're not intending on making landfall. Sceleria is also apparently making inroads to the ocean - they're a spooky skeleton nation so they can just walk their skellies underwater, but I very much doubt they'll last long against the actual UW nations in the game. We're also getting some vision on Pyrene, a new nation in Dom6. Since this update's already pretty long I'll cover them later - I'm not sure exactly what their general game plan looks like at this point.
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Apr 24, 2024 04:32
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I hadn't noticed but even before Ys attacked your provinces, there's no direct land connection from Phaeacia's capital peninsula to the mainland. Does the national sailing allow income to trace across water, or are you just not getting any gold from the northern territories until you take Phlegra's capital?
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Apr 24, 2024 05:39
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Some nations innately have the ability to trace income across water, and Phaeacia is one of them. I might be forgetting one, but to my knowledge all vanilla nations that have sailing have this ability to trace income. However, it's totally possible to make a nation that has national sailing, but can't trace income over water. And of course gaining sailing from non-national means(like the new water kobold summon) doesn't give sea income tracing either.
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Apr 24, 2024 08:50
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It's also worth noting that taking down a nation's PG, or attacking them before a dormant/imprisoned PG comes online, disables the expensive parts of their bless that only functions as long as their God is alive. Dead gods do not permanently turn this off as they can be Recalled, but it's expensive in priest turns to beg them to get out of bed again. A Recuperation bless isn't a huge deal to take down, if it was Regen it would've been more important, but especially in early game, some nations do truly have a load bearing bless that permits them to be scary at all.
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Apr 24, 2024 11:44
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Maybe tell us which nation is represented by each flag? I haven't kept up with Dominions since Dom 3, a decade ago. I have no idea who some of those flags are.
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Apr 24, 2024 14:17
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Kanthulhu posted:Maybe tell us which nation is represented by each flag? Oh yea, totally fair - I'll add a section to the overview and add a little flag icon when I'm talking about them. You kinda forget not everyone knows the flags by heart after staring at the map screen for way too many hours haha
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Apr 24, 2024 16:59
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PurpleXVI posted:It's also worth noting that taking down a nation's PG, or attacking them before a dormant/imprisoned PG comes online, disables the expensive parts of their bless that only functions as long as their God is alive. Dead gods do not permanently turn this off as they can be Recalled, but it's expensive in priest turns to beg them to get out of bed again. Yea, and Phlegra in particular really does not care at all about their bless since they can't recruit any sacred troops at all. I was putting a lot of importance on killing the PG specifically because of it's abilities as a combat unit - a high protection regenning trampler can just ignore everything you throw at it while it squashes nearly infinite numbers of troops. With magic coming online it was a bit more vulnerable, but if Phlegra had had time to go forge a shock resistance ring (gives 15 shock resistance, effectively making lightning bolt only rarely do damage) then I'm not sure I had any viable way to kill it at this point.
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Apr 24, 2024 17:04
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PurpleXVI posted:Conversely I've never seen them win a fight. Maybe the changes for Dom 6 improved them, but in Dom 5 all of the pokey dude infantry afforded to MA and LA R'lyeh were incredibly bad. My theory is that it's a combination of poor morale and attack/def skills that were just SLIGHTLY below average, meaning that even against the lion tribe of the sea they had a good chance of whiffing most of their attacks and running away the moment one of them had a stubbed toe. Meteorite Guard are pretty solid if you can afford the hefty resource cost. The other slave soldiers are pretty useless even as chaff, but chaff is what you have lobo guards for. Personally I never recruit crab hybrids. I enjoy seeing Dominions LPs, but I'm reluctant to get into multiplayer games because I have no sense of how to properly use mages other than forming giant communions and casting high-end spells. I keep doing single player games and thinking "this time I will use battle magic" and then don't.
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Apr 24, 2024 22:55
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namehereguy posted:I enjoy seeing Dominions LPs, but I'm reluctant to get into multiplayer games because I have no sense of how to properly use mages other than forming giant communions and casting high-end spells. I keep doing single player games and thinking "this time I will use battle magic" and then don't. You can genuinely win SP games by just murderballing your way across the map with troops, you never actually have to use battle magic, so it'll never teach you the hard way. MP games, on the other hand, will teach you the hard way the first time you play against MA C'tis and Foul Vapors melts all your heavily armored Ulm boys or something similar. Generally the way you get good at MP is to get owned and then incorporate the lessons from the last time you got owned into your own strategies going forward, so it requires some amount of mental sturdiness and steadiness to not get discouraged when someone looks at your carefully arranged battle lines goes: "sure would be a nice day for GIFTS! FROM! HEAVEN!" and wipes them all out with minimal losses.
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Apr 24, 2024 23:21
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There's a huge learning curve to magic - there's literally hundreds of spells, and understanding what's actually useful given your national mages, research level, kind of troops/nations you're fighting and just general utility of the spell kinda takes a lot of practice. Even just looking at something basic like fire evocations, you start with piddly little fire flies that only do 8 damage.... but, if you're happening to be fighting a bunch of completely unarmored troops they can actually do a lot of work if you have enough mages. For example, most ethereal troops have pretty poor armor instead relying on the 75% chance of normal attacks phasing through them. Blasting out a poo poo ton of low damage fire attacks that any fire mage can cast can actually do a lot of work. And then on the high end, that scales up with bigger spells and more damage until your piddly little mages are suddenly calling down 35 damage pillars of fire, or even literally lighting the entire battlefield on fire. If you can keep the mage casting it alive, the big battlefield evo spells can delete entire armies. I think the key is setting a few basic research goals that fit the situation well, and otherwise trying things out in less critical situations to see how well they work out. I definitely do some of that in this game later on... sometimes it works, and sometimes it definitely doesn't  . And then yea, as Purple mentioned you can learn a lot from watching how more experienced players just tear your armies apart. Gotta have the right attitude though, because losing a game the course of 2 or 3 turns when you've been playing for 2 months can definitely sting.
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Apr 24, 2024 23:56
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Yeah the key to getting magic down when getting into Dominions is to set goals early. Pick the winners, set yourself up to cast them and then do it. Try it out in SP beforehand, you will see the results and just make it happen. Multiplayer flexibility comes with play, but there are some classic standbys that will get you through no matter what and you WILL have mages to cast them.
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Apr 25, 2024 01:44
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Turn 13 Alright, let's see what we've got going on this turn. First up, we have Ys paying us for the two provinces they've taken. While this is a pretty ridiculously cheap deal for two pretty good provinces, I'm still happy with the decision so far - I'd really like the two ocean nations to stay busy with each other instead of casting greedy eyes towards all my glorious coastline. Next, we have one of the weavers site searching and finding two sites - very nice! This is what our gem + gold income is looking like at this point. Having some income of everything except pearls and death is pretty good, since it should let us eventually break into other paths if needed. The nature especially is nice; we don't get any native N mages or income, so a trickle there to get started is a big help. Next up, we have the fight in Phlegra. On our side, we have the combined forces from both last turn's PG fight and the secondary force coming in from the North. It's a pretty good sized stack for this point in the game, well over 100 units. On Phlegra's side... yea, this is just their capital province defense. I'm not going to show the battle, it's a complete stomp - this many colossi against even lots of human PD just isn't a contest. We come out of it with two losses, and we're now sitting on Phlegra's capital & blocking their only means of getting back in the fight. In fact, taking a peek at the Pretenders of the World screen shows some very useful info: Phlegra has gone AI. Going AI basically means letting the game take over your nation and play it to the best of it's ability... but, that ability is generally quite poor. It acts more or less randomly and struggles to use any kind of magic effectively, being mostly limited to casting random summon spells and building somewhat effective stacks of troops. I can't blame Phlegra's player here - while remaining in a game you're losing just purely out of spite is definitely a valid strategy, it's also only fun/funny if you can actually do anything, and Phlegra is pretty much out of tricks. Looking at the strategic map (Now with nation names!), we can see the only forces Phlegra has left one province to the north of the capital. Two tyrants with some more gigantes and a gaggle of crossbows isn't nothing, but it's definitely not enough to take our full force. Since the AI plays poorly, I'm going to take a bit of a risk here and move 3 of my 4 captains into this stack with most of the Phaeacian army. This would be pretty risky against a player since those tyrants are still fairly dangerous, but against the AI I'm a lot more confident. The smart move would probably be to try and split up the tyrants and counter raid my territory - at least, that's the most annoying thing to have to deal with for me so it's what I'd do in their shoes. The AI will more than likely either just sit there or try to attack the siege though, so I'm not too worried about it. You can also see from the messages that we've picked up this fine fellow as a mercenary. Urguk and his buddies (who are just the troop version of the same unit type) are... absolute trash, awful units. But, there's a lot of them, so I'm hoping they along with a few colossi that wound up leaderless in their province can snag the Phlegran province so the southwest of the capital. These mercs are super cheap, like 30 gold, so this is a low-risk way of speeding up province acquisition. Now that Phlegra has gone AI, we need to capitalize on their former lands as quickly as possible - the neighboring players are sure to smell the blood in the water and try to nibble off what they can. Finally, now that lightning bolt research is done we're refocusing into Construction, with Construction 3 as our immediate target. Construction 3 lets us make Owl Quills, which are a research boosting item. 5 Air Gems gets us an item that grants +6RP to any mage that equips it. That takes our weavers from 14->20 RP per turn, so the turn it takes to forge pays off quickly. Our weavers also have an inherent forge bonus, meaning every item they make costs 1 fewer gem than usual - 4 air gems per quill is well worth it to accelerate our research, especially since we've been building a ton of captains to support the early war. Captains can research too, but they're a lot less gold efficient compared with the weavers so we don't want to have them be our sole mages. The focus on the next few turns is going to be trying to grab everything Phlegra had - we're still fairly small, so we really need to snag as much as we can for this war to have been worth it. The capital itself I'm going to just leave sieged for now - there's no real rush to siege it down and it could be very costly to do so. After that, we might take a look at the nearby thrones and see if we can't grab them fairly soon. DarthRoblox fucked around with this message at 05:08 on Apr 27, 2024 |
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Apr 27, 2024 03:59
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I remember Machaka and Tien Chi but what kind of nation is Pyrene?
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Apr 27, 2024 14:59
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They’re new in dominions 6 - I’ll do a proper intro later, but they’re basically semi-civilized cave tribes who have been tempted into blood-based shenanigans by goat-men. Mechanically, they have mostly human and Bekyryde troops, who are sorta caveman like. They also have sacred knights riding big horn sheep, and mostly dabble in nature and blood magic.
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Apr 27, 2024 15:16
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