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DarthRoblox posted:Ha, yea - that was a fun fight. "Major battle" is overselling it, but basically I was Piconye (a nation of hobbit people) squaring off against Atlantis (frog people). Atlantis had gotten together a number of golem thugs - in Dominions terms, a "thug" is a single unit that's intended to take on moderate amounts of units by itself. I had a battle like that back in Dominions 5, against Arcvasti as Arcoscephale while I was Mictlan. I bumped into one of his golems he'd been raiding me with and put up Howl, which didn't kill the golem, but kept him buried in dogs until turn 100 hit. In Dom 5, on Turn 100, the attackers would start routing(at 150, defenders would rout, 200 everyone would just get deleted off the battlefield, to prevent one odd thing from hardlocking the entire game). But since golems are mindless magical units, when they rout, they don't just run away, instead they melt. So Howl ended up killing him indirectly.
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Apr 19, 2024 02:51
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DarthRoblox posted:We're unfortunately limited to about 1 province per turn through turn 9. This is... pretty bad, as a general guideline you really want to be getting close to 18-20 provinces by the end of year 1 to be having a "good" expansion (turn 12). We're at 8, with a path to get maaaaybe 2 more. It's not that we've lost any big fights, but the map structure had us going up our little peninsula against fairly tough indies, and then by the time we finally got vision to sail at the mainland it's already been fully claimed by the multiple new human nations we can see. The indies are largely variants of what we've already seen - horse tribe, bone tribe, some heavy cavalry and standard human troops. We take some minimal losses, but nothing worth recreating. I'd disagree a bit with this assessment, but it depends a lot on your map. On most of the ones traditionally used by the Ruby Discord, if everyone has 12 provinces by turn 12, then all non-throne provinces are gonna be filled out, more or less. One province per turn is about what you can reasonably expect because you might run into "dead ends"(advancing just means dead expanders due to powerful indies or starting a year 0 hellwar due to encountering someone else's expansion) or want to hold off a turn of expansion to buff up your expander with some research or your expansion troops with reinforcements(indie fights are very rarely 1:1 unit exchanges, usually you either lose only a handful or you lose EVERYTHING, so being sure to be on the right side of that seesaw is important). Province value is also a big deal, getting three wastelands(unless they have good sites or throne access or some such) is worth far less than getting a 20k pop farmland province. So I think strict maths of "if you don't have 20 provinces by turn 12, you're behind" shouldn't be in mind, it'll just lead to losing IRL morale. Aiming for 12 by turn 12 is far more realistic in most cases. Arcvasti posted:This was a real problem with mindless thugs in Dom5, yeah. In Dom6 I think it's less of an issue because the rout timer is longer, and most thugs have trouble surviving the turn 100 threshold, which now dispels all of their buffs(including the bless!). With that, and golems going down a research level to Construction 6, perhaps it is time for golem thugs once again... Please test them in a game I'm not in, I'm tired of you kicking my rear end.
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Apr 19, 2024 12:31
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Redmark posted:I think of "N provinces by turn X" as a proxy for general expansion strength rather than an actual accounting. If your setup is capable of fast expansion, it could manifest as actual N provinces, or as taking a difficult province in an important location that otherwise must be skipped, or having a strong intact expansion group ready to invade someone else, or simply as stability (less likely to lose fights against indies). One thing is indie numbers are just generally up across the board(but provinces are also generally richer and scales are rewarded more, so you can bulk up your own forces faster, too), the second is some changes to mechanics that have subtle effects. For instance, large chaff armies(see, for instance, MA Ermor's freespawn) used to do way more work, but now they get way more effortlessly bodied by high-quality elites. The attacks of sacred units' mounts also used to not get bless effects, but most mounted sacreds now also have sacred mounts that get bless boosts, making sacred cavalry a good deal scarier. There's also the Cave Layer, which... we don't go to the Cave Layer. It's where all the scary poo poo lives.
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Apr 19, 2024 20:13
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DarthRoblox posted:The tyrant in particular is a pseudo-army killer all on his own. In fact, you're encouraged to always have him out fighting because he has a big research malus and causes unrest just by existing in a province. He has a lot of magic paths, but they're mostly for self-buffing since he's also a berserker, and berserk units don't case spells. These guys can become right terrors with enough research, but since we're still in year 0 I'm hoping he can at most lightly buff his protection. Worth noting is that he's a Berserker but not Berserking. Some units are always Berserk, meaning they start fights that way and rush right at the enemy, but ordinary Berserkers like this fella only Berserk once they get hit, so they have some turns to self-buff before the real scrum starts, and can even work as proper mages as long as they don't get hit by an errant arrow that makes them froth at the mouth. Also God, what a starting position. Dom 6 seems to love creating these map "dead ends" and starting people in them when you use the built-in map gen. I can't wait until the Ruby Discord builds up a decent library of non-hosed maps to use regularly.
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Apr 21, 2024 10:27
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DarthRoblox posted:But - it's not going to be one of the small raiding squads moving into that province. We're moving a total of three storm captains with 115 total troops between them, 18 of which are Orichalcum guard. This is the majority of our strength at this point, so if this goes badly we could be in a lot of trouble. A big key to this plan is to move quickly and win decisive victories early on - a prolonged and costly war would put us well behind the curve in terms of power, if not get us killed more or less outright. This is why I prefer not to fight wars at all. Fighting wars means you risk resources to gain resources, simply getting paid off by other players or extorting them means you get resources for not risking resources. Lord Koth posted:MA Rl'yeh's troop and commander pool is basically entirely amphibious, so this isn't it. Other than just providing a quicker path to Rl'yeh-controlled territory (which goes both ways), I'm not really seeing it. Actually, I'm somewhat surprised they're not planning to backstab Phaecia at the earliest opportunity here, because Ys really, really wants coastal provinces (which is entirely what Phaecia's peninsula is), their troops are better on land, and they're notably weaker than Rl'yeh underwater. As an important note, MA and LA R'lyeh's troops and commanders are almost entirely amphibious... except for their only good recruitables, crab hybrids, while everything else they have is more or less purely dogshit chaff. Crab hybrids are sadly aquatic, and they're the only troops they have that reliably do anything other than routing and getting murdered by merrows or something.
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Apr 23, 2024 17:42
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Lord Koth posted:...I have never, EVER seen Meteorite Guard called dogshit crap before. Good HP, high prot, relatively cheap slaves that come with a very high damage magical attack. And once they get rolling MA has the gold to actually make a bunch of Illithids to back up their frontline too. Conversely I've never seen them win a fight. Maybe the changes for Dom 6 improved them, but in Dom 5 all of the pokey dude infantry afforded to MA and LA R'lyeh were incredibly bad. My theory is that it's a combination of poor morale and attack/def skills that were just SLIGHTLY below average, meaning that even against the lion tribe of the sea they had a good chance of whiffing most of their attacks and running away the moment one of them had a stubbed toe.
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Apr 23, 2024 18:01
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It's also worth noting that taking down a nation's PG, or attacking them before a dormant/imprisoned PG comes online, disables the expensive parts of their bless that only functions as long as their God is alive. Dead gods do not permanently turn this off as they can be Recalled, but it's expensive in priest turns to beg them to get out of bed again. A Recuperation bless isn't a huge deal to take down, if it was Regen it would've been more important, but especially in early game, some nations do truly have a load bearing bless that permits them to be scary at all.
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Apr 24, 2024 11:44
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namehereguy posted:I enjoy seeing Dominions LPs, but I'm reluctant to get into multiplayer games because I have no sense of how to properly use mages other than forming giant communions and casting high-end spells. I keep doing single player games and thinking "this time I will use battle magic" and then don't. You can genuinely win SP games by just murderballing your way across the map with troops, you never actually have to use battle magic, so it'll never teach you the hard way. MP games, on the other hand, will teach you the hard way the first time you play against MA C'tis and Foul Vapors melts all your heavily armored Ulm boys or something similar. Generally the way you get good at MP is to get owned and then incorporate the lessons from the last time you got owned into your own strategies going forward, so it requires some amount of mental sturdiness and steadiness to not get discouraged when someone looks at your carefully arranged battle lines goes: "sure would be a nice day for GIFTS! FROM! HEAVEN!" and wipes them all out with minimal losses.
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Apr 24, 2024 23:21
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It's extremely satisfying when you clinch a strategically superior position and just have like red move arrows going everywhere as you rush the hell out of someone, either raiding them or having broken their defensive strongpoints/counterattacked and moving in to eat them up.
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Apr 28, 2024 21:44
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Alchenar posted:Does independent province defence strength indicate a particularly juicy province or is it basically random? DarthRoblox posted:Basically random - it typically tells you what kind of units you can recruit from that province, but that's about it. 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. DarthRoblox posted: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. The death matches have been changed up some since Dominions 5, where they only yielded the item and were generally a waste of your time unless you could get a powerful assassin type commander in there to snag it. Buffing the prizes is a sorely lacking point, in my opinion. However, not sending anyone to the Deathmatch is a sign of cowardice, so you should always at least have a scout ready to send off. It's just tradition. Plus if no one sends anyone it disappoints the entire world who had been hoping for the PPV event and drops dominion candles globally.
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May 1, 2024 15:46
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DarthRoblox posted: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. I feel like if you do that, you ought to at least give them a funny gimmick name of some sort.  I usually name mine stuff like Ritual Arena Sacrifice.DarthRoblox posted: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. As I understand it, indie provinces can still get events(though indie attacks, obviously being of the same faction, would just join up), but some events cause afflictions for commanders. It might be something like that.
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May 3, 2024 01:42
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Breadmaster posted:So does the appearance of Eremor/other pop-kill nations still make everyone else team up to smother them before they all drown in undead? Theoretically yes, because it's to everyone's benefit for them to die. Practically, not always, because killing them is usually weakening work which, if their popkilliness has done its thing, rewards poorly due to their dominion having stripped their territory bare. So even if every single neighbour jumps them, the people who aren't their neighbours may then backstab them, which means that it's either a very early strangling in the crib, or everyone sort of dances around the issue without really wanting to commit since being the one who makes that decision is often a losing proposition towards other players. They also have varying levels of popkillitude. MA Ermor and LA Lemuria are the killiest, they can strip 30% pop from a province per turn easy, while MA Aspho, LA R'lyeh and EA Therodos do it somewhat slower, but still eventually strangle things. EA Therodos and MA Ermor also have a mechanic where forted provinces retain up to a few thousand population, meaning they're not COMPLETELY miserable.
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May 3, 2024 03:27
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Arcvasti posted:Asphodel also has a reputation, persisting from dominions five, of being a weak and ineffectual popkill, so people don't swarm them nearly as often. Probably the biggest change to them, more than anything else, is that they can now start at Growth 4(the new cap for scales is 5, though most nations are capped at 2, some pretenders and nations can shove this up to 3, Asphodel can have Growth 4, the other popkills can usually have Death 4), which slowly and by a poorly understood mechanic changes farms and plains to forests, which makes them less reliant on starting in, and fully taking, a big forest cluster(only forests provide their good freespawn, and allows them to summon relatively cheap forts that are decent rather than having to build very expensive forts that suck poo poo), plus it means that if they hit their obvious eventual goal of Enchanted Forests, that's suddenly going to have a lot more real estate to play in. The change to Well of Misery also benefits them a lot, it provides a global +2 to Growth(and +5 in the province it's cast in), so anyone who picked Growth 2 or 3 for some nice income and supply scales, is going to find their nation suddenly turning into forests if Aspho pops Well of Misery.
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May 3, 2024 10:31
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namehereguy posted:Also, fighting popkill nations is a pain in the rear end because their core territories are low supply zones due to all the dead pop. You have to bust out supply generators to support your army if you want to actually invade into there. Which, if you don't have Nature, are pretty hard to get ahold of. Ermor definitely produces a ton more commanders in 6, when I won as them in Basic_Bishops(primarily because diplomatic wheeling and dealing and a very unusual PG with N, empowered in a dash of W, allowing me to add Foul Vapors to armies), I had so many idiot loving Tomb Kings I had to tell to "Wait" every turn. It was worse than LA R'lyeh. MA Aspho doesn't get a completely absurd number of commanders, but I've still never really had an issue getting enough commanders for my troops.
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May 3, 2024 19:44
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DarthRoblox posted:So, in dominions 6 there's actually a change to how the highest level of research works. In levels 1 through 8, research costs roughly double per level - so 50RP to level 1, 100 to level 2, 200 to level 3, etc., until you reach 4400 for level 8 (the doubling evens off a bit at higher levels). A good number of level 9 spells, for instance stuff like Summon Tarrasque, the nexus doors spell, and a few other gimmicky ones could easily be moved down to level 8. Even stuff like Lost Land, because with an 100 gem casting cost, that's never going to get cast more than once, or at most twice, outside of some truly eternal hellgame.
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May 6, 2024 11:16
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DarthRoblox posted:From a more meta perspective, I'm not actually sure when global conflicts start - I think there was some griping about players bumping into each other around now, but I don't think anyone else was fully at war. That will definitely change though; things don't stay peaceful for long in dominions. It usually depends a lot on timing, builds and nations. If someone feels pushed into a corner by expansion, they might see an early war as their only chance of breaking it, or someone's build might rely on annihilating someone else year 1 to avoid getting choked by their own bad scales(in another game, someone tried to drop a dragon on my cap, halfway through the first year, to attempt to domkill me), or someone might've decided to jump a player who had a clearly poor starting expansion, and then any of those things can sometimes touch off other people deciding to join in, diplomatic misunderstandings can blossom into wars, etc. But usually the more certain global conflicts start off around 1.5 or 2 years in, once people have taken out all their neighbouring indies, start jostling for thrones, start feeling like they have the necessary research to prosecute a war successfully or perhaps someone setting up a global that marks them as a danger(like a very early gemgen, etc.).
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May 7, 2024 16:17
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Akratic Method posted:lol, details please. I don't know enough of the spells/summons to know what this refers to. Oh it was literally a dragon, his god, combined with stealthy H2 and H3 priests. The attempt failed but completely hosed up my expansion because my God had to waste time running around chasing it to kill it.
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May 7, 2024 19:15
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Mindopali posted:From previous LP's I read I got the feeling that players also like to negotiate who to defend against or pay for some calm on at least one front when stuff gets violent. I guess if your neighbor's communication remains calm, then things haven't heated up too much yet. A lot of players are quiet, even when things go badly, which can be both a strength and a weakness. Because if I DM you and go "hey we should attack Man together  " it could either indicate that I want my victory to go a bit more easily... or that I am a nice weak target that you can own from one end while Man is owning the other, which is why it's usually weakness to reach out to potential third parties that only border your enemy, not yourself, so things can't go haywire.Personally I just swap into "spite mode" if someone's really on a winning roll against me, at which point I start disregarding my own future play in favour of being willing to buy allies for three-digit gem numbers. I feel like it contributes to a mythos where attacking me is a poor idea.
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May 7, 2024 19:40
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Numbus26 posted:I've been taking a look at some of the older Dominions games posted to this forum to get context for this one, and I'm very interested in the new cave layer. Is it really any good at all? It seems like another "well, there are two or three nations that want to be underwater and nobody else touches it" sort of deal. The cave layer has a couple of issues, primarily tied to the way its generated by default. Firstly, it generally has far nastier indies than the surface, so it's a lot easier to get blocked in by them. Secondly, cave/surface connections are usually clustered in a small section of the overworld, between the territories of two or three surface nations. Lastly, caves are generally generated very "narrowly" so that caps tend to have small cap circles and there are a lot of choke points where you will have no expansion choices at all beyond just that one way. Once people move to using more hand-made maps, I assume this is gonna be cleared up, or they're going to unkrangle the default cave generation somehow.
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May 8, 2024 01:59
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Pharnakes posted:They should make some globals to push scales by a couple points. Not sure if this is a joke or not, but, for instance, if you cast Well of Misery that nudges up Growth globally by +2(and by +5 in the source province), Stellar Focus raises Magic in its source provinces, lowers it across the world, Nature's Bounty raises Growth by Dominion points in every province the caster has Dominion over, etc. I think Drain is the only one that doesn't have any spectacular 4/5 effects, but probably that's because it's miserable enough at 2 and 3 without further awfulness.
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May 8, 2024 22:40
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Lord Koth posted:Meanwhile, of the positive scales it's only Growth that doesn't really have a negative effect. Hell, it's actually a positive effect most of the time. However, if someone then casts, say, Wild Hunt, or Enchanted Forests, there are suddenly some considerable negative effects to having all your Plains and Farmlands turned into Forests, especially since most capitals are Plains or Farmlands and a lot of mages in your research stacks are likely to have Holy paths for a lot of nations...
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May 8, 2024 23:31
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Numbus26 posted:Sometimes I wonder if there are any 'good guys' in Dominions. I mean obviously everybody's warring to be Top God, but everything I see is all "sacrificing virgins for demon power" and "summoning ten thousand skeletons For The Trees". Is there a single nation besides Man(which I've gathered is The Boring One) where people aren't just assholes? I mean, most of the human, non-blood nations are "neutral." Like their backgrounds don't really involve any genocides, their troops aren't slaves, etc. same goes for the non-Lanka monkey nations. Arcoscephale even has free healthcare. Pangaea just wants to dance but the humans keep making noise complaints and getting their raves broken up by the cops, then in MA and LA games they also call the HOA to make Pangaea trim back their hedges and then that whole thing starts. The sea nations are also generally inoffensive except for R'lyeh that dreams of total world domination. Sceleria just uses skeletons like appliances. Like do you enjoy mowing the lawn? No. Good! Because here's a skeleton that can do it for you! He can clean out the gutters and harvest crops, too. Never you mind what he's going to use those tools for if there's a war... It's even entirely possible to prosecute an ascension war without a civilian-eating PG, and you can prosecute strategies that vaporize only enemy troops with no pillaging and raiding, you can prioritize globals that help everyone(Gift of Health, Gift of Nature's Bounty, Well of Misery, etc.) while also helping you quite a lot, they're very good spells in general. But some nations have paths that force them into other strategies, or they might simply find they're fun. Maybe it's time to summon the Ghost Cops and Robot Cops with Fata Morgana and Mechanical Militia, maybe it's time to hoover up a lot of slaves with Blood Vortex, maybe we cast Dark Slumber a few dozen times to turn a few innocent villages into angry potted plants... Generally the only nations fated to be huge assholes are blood magic nations, popkill nations and the goddamn giants. Though it's worth noting that the Dominions world, through a quirk of geology, doesn't require actually killing anyone to summon skeletons. There's a geological "skeleton strata" located some miles down which can be mined by necromancers for undead without actually harvesting fresh bones. This is why some undead are known as "longdead," because you have to dig down a "long way" to bring their bones up to the surface.
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May 9, 2024 12:19
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Y'all can put up with gig economy imps replacing the citadel-building workface, because otherwise you're going to be working for the squid.
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May 9, 2024 12:43
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wiegieman posted:Almost all of the Pretenders are beings who suffered some kind of endless punishment under the rule of the previous Pantokrator. There's no indication that they will be any different when they're on the throne. Well, there are a couple who were explicitly given endless punishment for trying to help mortals, like "goddammit, how dare you teach these people how to make roads and boil water before drinking it, into the Doom Pits with you," so one might presume they'll get back to offering us the tempting delights of free healthcare and wifi when they're on the throne themselves.
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May 9, 2024 16:00
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One More Fat Nerd posted:Always kinda found it silly that they're extremely powerful wizards... who don't actually know any spells at the start of the game. Maybe they know the spells and their research is just negotiating the licensing agreements to be allowed to cast them. Those astral EULA's are brutal.
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May 9, 2024 16:16
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I felt like their freespawn was really cranked down in 6 compared to 5, last I tried them. Even templing the hell out of everything it felt like I still only got a pitiful dribble of demons.
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May 13, 2024 12:31
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