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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 Turn 15 Turn 16 Turn 17 Turn 18 DarthRoblox fucked around with this message at 05:12 on May 4, 2024 |
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Apr 11, 2024 06:45
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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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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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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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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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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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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'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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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: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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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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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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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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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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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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Turn 14 A fairly quiet turn aside from the battles - some turns you get 10 random events, other times barely any. The event this turn is in our cap, and it's a bit of fun flavor: Each ~year (12 turns), Phaeacia gets a contingent of these dudes, honoring the ancient pact. These are proper giants, size 6 (out of 10), 2 larger than our colossi. They're led by a Lochos, this fine fella: He's a very solid combatant - decent protection, magic armor and weapons, lots of HP and skill. One gripe I have with these guys is that they can't actually sail as a unit ability. That means that for now, this guy and his seven buddies (they're basically the same troop, just with mundane equipment instead of magic) are going to just hang out in our capital. We're sailing some priests in to the mainland this turn to try and get dark sails up and running. Onto the actual fights! First up, a scout observes T'ien Ch'i's PG chow down on some indies - nothing new there. We do see it cast personal stoneskin and strength of giants, which are Alteration 2 and Enchantment 1 spells, telling us TC has focused research towards buffing their god for now. Useful info to file away. Next up, we have our trash mercs running into a decent amount of PD. Luckily it's low-armor tribe PD, so we can actually hurt them. It's a messy affair, with both sides taking plenty of losses. Foul spawn put out a decent amount of damage since they have 2 attacks each (every unit gets to use all of it's attacks each round, so these guys hit twice). They start to trickle through to the backlines. Eventually they manage to attrition down the PD to the point where it breaks, handing us a win. A few losses, but absolutely acceptable for a 40 gold investment. The province alone will pay for that cost in a turn, and it makes sure that TC can't snipe it before we could otherwise get to it. I don't really have a use for these guys after this, so I'll likely run them into the nearby throne province to scout out what kind of troops are in it. Onto the real fight for the turn: On our side, a fairly similar arrangement to the fight against Phlegra's PG, if a bit lighter on troops due to leaving some behind to keep the capital under siege. Phlegra's side is a little chaotic - I'm not actually sure if this is the previous player's arrangement before they went AI, or if this is what the AI chose to do. Either way, the troops are fairly spread out and are likely to run into our lines pretty piecemeal. We also get a look at Phlegra's prophet, I'd hit *that* with a club. Take a look at that damage, 44 damage on a 13 attack club is actually pretty formidable. Combined with the extra HP for being a prophet in friendly dominion, and this guy could actually be fairly rough. Very little protection though. The initial clash is between the gigante squads and our guard - the tyrants are sitting in the back and self-buffing. This isn't great for the gigantes - they don't have the highest attack and our guard have pretty good defense. A few rounds on, and we can see two status effects on the gigantes. The pink-ish looking ones have gone berserk (will never rout, extra attack, strength, and protection at the cost of defense and fatigue) while the grayed out looking one has been stunned by a lightning bolt. Lightning bolts do their work, and the gigantes squad is mostly cleaned up. A squad of our heavies has broken away into the enemy backlines... right as the two tyrants have finally made their way over. These guys are going to have a bad time; the tyrants will demolish them in small numbers. Despite that, our troops finish off the last of the gigantes and completely surround the farther forward tyrant. Light colossi have a tough time damaging him, but with so many incoming attacks they'll get lucky sometimes. Shortly after that the remaining PD and crossbow troops break, leaving just the berserk tyrant and cyclops prophet left on the field. They last for a bit due to protection and HP, but we manage to spear and bolt them down eventually. And with that, we've traded a few light and heavy Colossi for the remaining forces Phlegra has on the field. Our scouts can see the rest of their lands and there's only a few random troops here and there, mostly survivors that fled previous battles. As a result, we're going hyper-aggressive here. With no remaining armies to worry about, we're going to go for the rare quintuple attack. If successful, this should claim nearly every remaining Phlegran province. We also spot a stack of spiders from Machaka to the north - those make me slightly nervous since they're fairly nasty sacreds. After reaching out to Machaka's player though we agree to stay friendly for now - a war between us would be pretty destructive to both sides, nothing like the very fast war that we just won. Each attack looks very similar to this - 10 frontline troops of mixed heavies and guard, backed by 20 or so lights. This should be more than enough to deal with even quite a lot of PD and I'm totally fine with a few losses here to secure our profit from the war. Assuming this works, we'll be in good shape to start thinking about next steps. Despite the win here, we're only still only at about 19 provinces if we take all 5 this turn. That's way better than we were doing, but in my opinion if you're not gaining territory this early on then other players are, putting you behind. We want to get a lot of forts and temples built to spread our really good scales, which means income and coastal provinces to put those forts on. While Machaka is looking tough, TC seems to be struggling a bit to fill in all of their indie provinces...
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Apr 28, 2024 21:31
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feller posted:I've played every dominions game since 3 and didn't even know 6 was out til this LP. So, thanks! You got it! There's a few newbie-oriented lobbies actively wanting players on the discord if multiplayer is your thing.
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Apr 28, 2024 22:24
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Dominions is a pretty amazing (usually unintentional) comedy generator if viewed in the right light. The sheer number of dice rolls plus the weird dice system dominions uses creates a lot of opportunity for staggeringly unlikely things to happen more often than you'd expect. I don't remember if I've talked about it or not, but almost every stat and calculation in the game has a "dominions random number" added to it, which is basically a 2d6, exploding on 6's. So, while a unit with 10 strength hitting another with 9 protection will on average do 1 damage a poo poo, in practice you wind up seeing a surprising number of 10's or even 20's pop out (along with a lot of 0's). We'll definitely see the full effects of the RNG later on in this game, for better and for worse, but the stupid situations you wind up in due to incredible(ly bad) luck are incredibly funny once you get over the pain of losing hours of planning to a poorly placed arrow.
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Apr 30, 2024 01:39
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Turn 15 Lots of battles this turn, as we expected. We get a random event: Ominous? Sometimes these random events indicate something going on in the province, like a hidden heretic priest or monster boar that needs to be dealt with. I think this is just random flavor though. The unrest is mildly annoying since income is reduced by your unrest %, but it'll resolve on it's own given time. Magic is just a temporary change to the magic scale; mostly irrelevant. In non-random events, we see our first full fortress going up this turn. Forts are a significant expense, taking a total of 9 turns and 1,600 gold to build. However, in exchange you get a number of bonuses. First up, the "Admin" value is a % income bonus, and then since we're Phaeacia we get a flat 10% for being on coast, meaning this province will forever give us +40% income over a non-improved version. It also lets us recruit our national troops and mages instead of just the local independents: Forts are how we're going to build our mage corps - most forts are going to be building a captain or a weaver every turn from now on to get our research going. We'll also want a very large number of weavers later in the game due to a mechanic we're going to be relying on heavily to stay competitive - communions. Communions are their whole own topic, but they basically let mages pool their power together, reducing "slaves" (the game's terminology, not my preferred choice but...) to comatose magic batteries, who in turn empower the "masters" (yep) with improved magic. The power gained grows logarithmicly by a power of 2: 2 slaves gets you +1 path, 4 gets you +2, 8 get you +3, etc. The whole communion also shares fatigue, meaning your empowered mages can cast really big spells much longer than they'd otherwise be able to. Of course, all that power comes with a downside - your battery mages are completely defenseless and immobile, and will almost certainly die if you lose the fight. Normally, mages can often survive lost battles by simply routing and running away since they tend to be at the back. Additionally, accumulating too much fatigue will cause a mage to start taking damage instead, so blowing up a whole communion is quite easy if you're not careful. Mages can and will cast any spell they have access to once your five scripted turns run out - more than once I've won a battle, but then had it continue for 10 rounds while hunting down stragglers and meanwhile the mages in the back have their heads explode due to useless spells still being cast. Fun times! Anyways - that's a lot of words on something that's not going to be at all relevant for at least a dozen turns, so I'll revisit it when we get there. Our battles this turn go as expected - one light colossi gets unlucky, but otherwise flawless victories across the board. The random commander in Yrik Balkor was probably trying to build a fort - we could have let him finish and then stolen the fort for ourselves, but oh well - our neighbors likely would've grabbed it anyways. With that, we've actually claimed every remaining Phlegran province. Their only remaining presence on the map is their capital, which is under siege. The line in the turn messages about the capital fort being "lightly damaged" suggests it's going to take a while to get through the walls, and that there's a decent number of troops inside. I think might opt to do a dominion kill here - capital forts are quite formidable, especially this early on, but if we can reduce Phlegra's dominion score to 0 in all provinces then they're out of the game and we can simply stroll on in. It can take a while to pull off a dom kill, but hey - it's not like it's going to take 30 turns or anything, right? In other world news, we can see that Pyréne to our west is quite large. Eyeballing it, they're at least 16 provinces and we haven't seen the west side of their lands yet. We haven't seen their bless yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if they have a fairly strong one. They also appear to have expanded into the caves layer - some of their troops are cave natives, so that's not too surprising. Either way, we need to keep an eye on them - if they're as large as they look, they're in a very strong position. If I had to guess, they're likely relying on either an awake expander like Phlegra and T'ien Ch'i, and/or have a strong bless on their sacred sheep knights: These guys are quite cool flavor-wise, and also pretty strong. A common weakness of cavalry in Dominions 6 is that the horses tend to be fairly unprotected and tend to die very quickly. Not so with these sheep though - 19 protection is more than anything we can recruit has. Hopefully a scout will catch one of their battles soon so we can see what we'd be up against. We'd be in a bad spot if they attacked us right now even blessless, so hopefully their attention is elsewhere. Finally, we're going to try and grab a mercenary mage this turn. I think I mentioned this guy in the first 10 turns, but he actually shows up here. Ferrus is an astral and earth mage - both paths we have nationally, but only at lower levels. If we get lucky, he can help us break more deeply into those paths by forging booster items later on. In the short term, he'd be a nice boost to our research. Otherwise, we're sending our foul spawn mercs into the throne to get a peek at what's guarding it, and setting all of our dispersed captains to do some site searching while they're spread out. 2A1W is reasonably likely to find at least something across 5 provinces.
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Apr 30, 2024 02:31
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Arrow to the knee, I'm afraid I don't think I've really talked about afflictions, but one of the insanely detailed things about dominions is that every single unit will slowly accrue afflictions as they engage in combat. Every time a unit takes damage, there's a percent chance that the damage results in a permanent affliction. These are things like a limp or being crippled (and then dying when you're force marched to a new province), battle fright, never healing wounds, etc etc. There's also some more temporary afflictions, like profuse bleeding. This only lasts for one battle, and continuously drains a unit's HP until the bleeding stops (and of course, the damage from bleeding has it's own chance to roll new afflictions. Fun!). For this particular fellow, the bleeding stops when he simply has no blood left in his body.
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Apr 30, 2024 04:55
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ousire posted:A small thing that amuses me is that three nations that all happen to be related to each other in the lore, all happened to end up in this same game and as neighbors to each other: The Phaeacian Colossi are decendants from the Lion Clan men of Machaka, and Phaeacia and Phlegra both have descendants from the giants of Mekone. Yea, the interconnectedness of the world is a big draw, it makes things feel alive and gives it a lot of flavor. There's even a little connection between Phlegra and Pyréne if you check the mouflon knight's description - both nations have the same magnificent sheep. If we hadn't rudely ended them, Phlegra even could've starting fielding some sheep with their cyclopes shepherds:
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Apr 30, 2024 14:27
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Totally - as absurd as the situations wind up being, almost all of the nations are based on historical analogues and the myths and traditions they're built from are treated with a lot of respect and care. I can't think of any lazy stereotypes or stock fantasy tropes in the design of any of the nations. With just over 100 nations in the game (granted, many are iterations or evolutions through the ages), it's a really impressive volume of research and mythology all packed into an absolutely ridiculous game. Some of the independents are less interesting - trolls are pretty much just trolls - but even then they have some fun with it. Probably my favorite random event message is simply: "Trolls!" and then a bunch of independent trolls attack one of your provinces. It's goofy but fun - I'll keep an eye out for some of the other more entertaining messages to highlight.
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May 1, 2024 04:38
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Turn 16 Nothing too exciting this turn - we can immediately see that all five of our captains failed to find any magic sites, which is pretty unlucky. Magic sites have different requirements to find, depending on their rarity, but generally speaking 2 in a path is enough to find about 90% of all possible options. So, there could still be a high level air site in one of these provinces, but it's pretty unlikely. We're also informed that we can declare a new prophet now that it's been long enough since our previous one was murdered by the sea elves. We're going to declare one of our scouts - a stealthy prophet can be quite nice, since they spread dominion naturally and high movement. We'll name him "Richy Rich", keeping on with the money theme. Speaking of money, we're now up to 4 palisades going up in various stages of completion. This is a a bit risky since we have a fairly small standing army, but once they finish we'll really be able to start ramping up our mage production and our neighbors seem friendly enough for now. We also get an... interesting random event. "Virgins" in this case refers to blood slaves. Blood slaves power blood magic, which works a bit differently than all the other schools. While there are a few blood sites (and in fact we found one already that gives us +3 slaves/turn), blood slaves are generally acquired by sending out blood mages to search up some virgins from your provinces who are then sacrificed to power blood magic. I'm, uh, not sure exactly how this is going to absolve you, but you do you buddy. We're not going to be a serious blood power in this game - while it's technically possible for any nation to break into blood, it's rarely worth it if you don't have recruitable mages with blood paths. Still, a low inflow of blood slaves is a useful thing to have to grab a few key items later. Moving on, let's see how our mercs are getting on. They're definitely a little thinned out from their early fight... let's see what they're up against today. ... oh. That's a LOT of barbarians. There's also a few other friends lurking in the back Sprites can be a big annoyance - they don't do any damage, but they have a long range attack that will instantly set a unit's fatigue to 100. In addition to preventing a unit from doing anything until their fatigue drops below 100, high fatigue also has attack and defense penalties. This is really not what you want when an angry barbarian is in your face and swinging a maul at said face. The other units are these guys - three enchanters. Indie throne defender mages almost always come with gems, which can potentially make them fairly dangerous since spells that need gems tend to be quite strong. A 2N, 1G mage isn't super intimidating, but they can summon a large swarm of bugs (normal sized, but more dangerous than it sounds) or just spam some tree animations, which can also be deadly. We can also see that this one happens to be carrying a magic item that gives him a bonus 2 nature gems for fights. These "temp gem gen" items can be pretty useful since otherwise mages can only restock on gems from laboratories. There's a chance that we'll pick up the item if we win the fight, which would be a nice little bonus. We don't currently have any N mages, but we will at some point. Our doomed mercs charge forward and you can see the volume of elf shots being fired - these will really break up the lines of a squad more organized than these foul spawn. The lines close and half our mercs instantly disappear in cloud of red numbers. Um, yea - you served us well you gross crossbreeding experiments, may you rest in peace. The summary shows what we already know - 200 barbarians is quite the crowd. It's not insurmountable for us since our troops are pretty good compared to most humans, but we'll still want to spend a few turns gathering most of our forces together to take this on. One final event is a worldwide one - there's a deathmatch scheduled! The deathmatch allows each nation to send a single contender to a series of single elimination battles, and the victor receives some gold, a magic item, and a pile of fire gems. The fire gems in particular would be nice for us, we only have a single gem coming in per turn and we'll want some later on for a pretty good summon. We're going to send in our Lochos. We don't have any gear to give him so he's just going as he is. I don't really expect him to win - he's fairly tough but doesn't have any tricks other than "hit thing hard". His weapon is magic, which might help? We rename him "Wait... This isn't Phaeacia" for a funny little gag, and send him off to glory and/or death. Movement this turn is just getting our troops shuffled over to take on the throne - it's going to be another turn before we're in place. Otherwise, we're getting some priests moved up around Phlegra's cap to start wearing down the dominion and getting more builders in place to keep expanding our coastal fortifications. DarthRoblox fucked around with this message at 14:52 on May 1, 2024 |
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May 1, 2024 14:48
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Alchenar posted:Does independent province defence strength indicate a particularly juicy province or is it basically random? Basically random - it typically tells you what kind of units you can recruit from that province, but that's about it. Throne can often have thematic defenders - ie, the Throne of Death will typically have a big pile of undead and a big necromancer, but other thrones will just have larger-than-usual but otherwise normal indies. There's also a handful of "special" sets of defenders that generally indicate a specific site exists in the province but we don't run into any of those this game; there's typically maybe a few like that our of the hundreds of provinces in the game.
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May 1, 2024 15:12
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PurpleXVI posted:Not quite, number of indie defenders outside of thrones almost always scales related to population, and high population, while not revealing sites and gem-richness, means more gold income and recruitment points. Which makes them an interesting early decision during expansion: do you risk the high level of defenders to cinch the good province, or risk someone else getting it first? Sometimes a viable strategy is to "encircle" a number of good provinces you want by going for weakly defended provinces and hoping no one wants the 15k pop province badly enough to start a year 1 hellwar over it. Fair points - knowing whether a province is going to generate a bunch of cash is really valuable, especially early on when you're scraping together pennies to get your first few forts off the ground. Since research compounds with time, getting early forts ASAP is almost always a priority for me, and you can't do that if you don't have any cash. And yea - even if you send some garbage nobody there's still a chance they could win, especially since the victor of each round doesn't heal in between fights. You can wind up in a situation where your plucky little scout only needs to land a single hit on the decked out terror of the seas to claim victory. Of course, it's more likely that they simply get wrecked by an actual contender, but you gotta do it for the fans.
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May 1, 2024 16:32
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Turn 17 A decent amount going on this turn - we have the arena (too bad the messages spoil the outcome a bit, but oh well), our throne ping, and hey look - the first throne of ascension has been claimed! This is Machaka's prophet, making them the first to take a throne. While we don't know what was guarding it, it presumably didn't do well against fire shielded spider knights. The throne of the moon is pretty nice. Most thrones of ascension give a minor buff or maybe a single gem when you first take the province, but then if you "claim" it with either your pretender god or a priest of at least holy 3 then you unlock additional benefits. This throne provides 1W and 1S gem, grants higher precision to any blessed troops, spreads dominion like a temple, and also adds +1 growth scale to any lands under your dominion. That's a lot of stuff! Sometimes thrones get ignored because of the difficulty of taking the harder defender sets, but the benefits are often worth figuring out a way to take them out. Plus, you need to do so to actually win the game so... Moving on, let's see how we did in the arena! The arena is fought as a series of 1-on-1 bouts. The first two are randomly chosen, and then I *think* the next set is randomly chosen from everyone still alive. It's also possible the winner simply continues fighting until they lose since that's how this iteration works out. Either way, we're up first with our Lochos. He winds up squared off with an Eldest Cyclops that Phlegra's AI sent to fight. He doesn't have any special gear and has poor attack, but he does have a large maul and sometimes that's all you need. The contenders close ranks, and immediately land devastating hits on each other. Unfortunately for us, the hit with the maul also gives our Lochos profuse bleeding (the deeper red 2), which immediately ticks over and kills him before any more blows are exchanged. Next up, Machaka has sent in one of the commander versions of their black hunters. It's also ungeared, but has three attacks and a web between the spider and the rider. The cyclops misses this time and is immediately poisoned - like the bleeding from our fight, he immediately drops as a result. Will the spider rider manage to make it past a single victory? Asphodel has sent what I think is one of their national heroes - heroes are special units that have a low chance to arrive every turn. This one is quite nasty - tons of life, 4 attacks, a bunch of skills and riders. It has a low attack score though and is carrying... a fire bolt wand??? Excuse me, judges?!? This is supposed to be the *people's* arena - spells attached to magic items aren't technically cast by the unit though, so this guy can chuck firebolts. While the first firebolt misses, the next impacts directly and torches the rider in a single hit. Hunter spiders are "stupid" mounts though - while normal mounts will immediately flee the battle if their rider dies, stupid mounts will stick around and continue fighting. They, uh, might hit their friends instead, but they'll fight! This one doesn't for long though - it takes another hit or two and then heads for the hills. Unfortunately for it, the arena is do-or-die - routing units are auto killed if they exit the field. We're into the semi-finals now - just R'lyeh and Man to go. R'lyeh is up first against the Mandragora, sending one of their mind-blasting illithid lords with a little bit of protection gear. Mind blasting is quite literal, by the way - Illithids can temporarily paralyze their opponents, which this one does. Unfortunately, it only does a small amount of actual damage (and it can be resisted), meaning this is just delaying the inevitable. Once the Ettin manages to stay unparalyzed long enough to close to melee, the fight's over in a round or two. We also see one of Asphodel's fun mechanics here - most of their units have a "carrion seed" ability, meaning units killed by them will pop back up as a vine-ridden manikin. This being the arena it immediately disappears, but still cool to see. Final round. Man has sent... a generic commander. I appreciate the adherence to the spirit of combat, but yea - this ends exactly as you'd expect. And with that, Asphodel's Mandragora is crowned the inaugural champion of the arena. The rewards are pretty nice - a decent number of fire gems, a few hundred gold, and a pretty decent magic item (that is now permanently glued to the Mandragora's head). It also mandates that it must defend it's title whenever the next arena rolls around, assuming it hasn't met it's end in the meantime. We have one more fight - I'd forgotten, but we're pinging the other throne on our little peninsula. This one is a bit less thematic - just larger than usual indie squads, and a few mages. Something that's a little weird is some of the defenders have afflictions - I haven't seen that before. I'm not sure what happened here, maybe one of the water nations tried to attack the throne and failed? Either way, this should be very manageable for us - there's nothing overly threatening so we just need a decent number of troops. For movement this turn, the biggest action we're taking is an assault on the barbarian/sprite throne. We can also see a few new names on the map - Sceleria, Man, and Na'Ba have all popped up in the distance. And, actually - right next to Man is Asphodel, in the darker green. Briefly, these nations are: - Man: A human nation based on Arthurian legend. Emphasis on heavy cav sacreds in the Knights of Avalon, lots of sorceresses and glamor/nature magic. - Asphodel: The wrath of nature. One of the "pop-kill" nations, where their dominion will outright kill the population of provinces and turns them into various vine creates. Nature and Death focus. - Na'Ba: A semi-human, semi-Jinn nation based on Arabian Nights and preislamic Arabia. Lots of glamoured units and big summonable Jinn troops, along with fire and air magic. - Sceleria: Basically a splinter faction from Ermor, which was a roman-esque EA nation that experienced a cataclysm between ages. While Ermor is now full-skeleton, all the time, Sceleria is only partially skeletonized. While they don't outright kill population, they rely heavily on reanimating massive volumes of skeletons and drowning you in numbers. Death and Astral magic for the most part. As it becomes relevant we'll dig more into the specifics of what each nation brings to the field. This is what we're sending in to try and take the fort guarded by the barbarians & sprites - no real special strategy here, basically just a big line of our heavies and guards, lights throwing javelins a rank back, and a bunch of lightning bolts from our captains. The hope is that the range fire will rout the barbarians quickly - if we have to grind it out then the high damage output of the barbarians could really sting. We're setting up at the back of the field to try and get as much ranged fire and bolts in as we can before the ranks close, and to hopefully prevent the sprites from immediately starting to fatigue us out. Finally, here's how the overall empire is looking. You can see that we have a total of 5 forts going up at once right now - they're all coastal, so once they're all done we're going to have a big surge in income. We also finished Construction 3 this turn so we're starting to make some owl quills - these will help accelerate our research as we start pumping out more and more mages. DarthRoblox fucked around with this message at 01:40 on May 3, 2024 |
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May 3, 2024 01:34
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It's just a real fuckin' good spell! I'm pretty sure my captains are still mostly scripted to spam lightning bolt even 35 turns later.
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May 3, 2024 02:06
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 09:37 |
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Phrosphor posted:Things are looking good but I feel alarm bells at your territory *appearing* cut off from your cap and surrounded (I know you can sail but it's hard for me to visualize that) by what feels like some of the stronger nations in the game. At some point I think you are going to squeezed between Machacka and Pyrene. If Pyrene and Man could be convinced to go to war I think it might protect your West. Taking another players cap this early does put a target on your head though, since everyone knows how good cap provinces are. Yea - despite the success against Phlegra, and honestly partially because of it, my position is still pretty tenuous. We haven't seen it in game yet, but Pyréne has a pretty nasty bless with shock resistance and a bunch of other stuff, making our lightning bolts a lot less effective. Machaka I've covered, but the black hunters remain pretty nasty and I don't know how well we'd stack up with them. From what we can see, Pyréne is likely quite a bit larger than us and Machaka is probably around the same size or a bit bigger. Being "cut-off" does look a bit weird, but Phaeacia can basically ignore ocean provinces so I can reinforce and move troops pretty easily. It does take two turns to move troops from my capital to the mainland coast since sailing can only go through 2 ocean provinces, which is a bit annoying, but otherwise it's not a big issue. Still though, that extra turn to get troops to the mainland and then however many more to defend more inland provinces is a potentially big deal if an inland war starts up. Machaka has a lot of coastline so I'd be able to raid them effectively, but war with Pyrene would be really bad right now. This is a game with mostly newer players, so I'm trying to stay friendly with both players. I think newbies are generally a little more unsure or tentative about taking aggressive action, so simply being communicative can be a good way to stave off wars. tbh I'd have preferred not to invade another player as early as I did in this game, but the map kinda forced my hand and made for an interesting enough situation I decided it would be worth doing an LP on.
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May 3, 2024 02:54
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