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ChickenWing posted:Fire only reduces the bonus given by nature. F2 alone won't lose you anything, you need FN for it to have an effect. No it reduces all max ages. Hence why Abysia suffers from perpetual old age.
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Aug 26, 2014 14:08
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AXE COP posted:No it reduces all max ages. Hence why Abysia suffers from perpetual old age. Yet another instance of the manual containing actual lies.
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Aug 26, 2014 14:11
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No the manual is correct, it is referring to the fact demons et al. don't get their maxage reduced, only creatures that can have their age modified by nature as opposed to blood/earth/death.
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Aug 26, 2014 14:18
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Oh is that what it is trying to say? Wow that is worded poorly.
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Aug 26, 2014 15:27
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:illwinter:
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Aug 26, 2014 16:15
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Illwinter Games: there is a difficulty curve for reading our manuals too
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Aug 26, 2014 18:05
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Agent Kool-Aid posted::illwinter: The writer of the manual is Bruce Geryk. The manual would be have more typos and weird sentences if it was written by Illwinter, let's remember he is... Swedish?
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Aug 26, 2014 19:36
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Turns 19 & 20: Deadly Combo Absolutely nothing of note happened on turn 19. The turn was spent researching, forging, and blood hunting. Nothing interesting was seen or heard, except that Mictlan is under attack by both Pangaea and Niefelheim. We're attacking Niefelheim soon, and ilu xuande should be attacking Pangaea, so we'll take some pressure off of Mictlan so I can kill them myself later. ilu xuande also told me that Niefelheim and Pangaea have allied with eachother and plan on attacking me as soon as Mictlan falls, so I told him he needs to hurry the hell up and invade Pangaea. Turn 20 We're ready to invade Niefelheim.  Our main army will hit the border this turn, while one of our Raksharaja will be leading our gana and a pile of undead behind them, since I forgot that they would slow the rest of our army down. We finished researching blood 4 this turn, which opens up this.  Rain of Toads increases the unrest of a province by 40 points, and diseases some of the units there. Every 15 points of unrest counts towards chaos power, so a province with 90 or more unrest will give our demons their full chaos power benefits even if the dominion in the province is order 3. We only have 2 Rakshasi who can cast it, so I'm dropping it on Niefelheim's capital the turn before we invade. At 100 unrest or more, a province can't recruit troops, so 2 turns of casting it will make them unable to recruit troops from their capital, in addition to taking a massive income hit. The plan is to just swoop in and hopefully fight a decisive single battle on their capital, but it definitely won't go that smoothly. Rain of Toads has a long enough range that we can hit most provinces we might be fighting in though. All of our current troops are taking part in this, my hope is that ilu xuande's assault on Pangaea will make them pull all their troops to fight him while we kill Lanka. Order 3 dominion hurts our Palankasha nearly to the point of uselessness, so inside their dominion we need rain of toads, our undead, and our massive pile of archers to win.  Our pretender is all geared out now, too. This isn't the greatest equipment that she could have, but it should be enough to make her unkillable inside her own dominion. She'll be tagging along, but unless we can force a fight in our own dominion(which might not be too hard, given that she spreads it pretty well) I'd like to keep her off the front lines. Enemies who attack her have to go through her awe, massive defence, damage reversal, length 4 spear repelling them, and her shield. The vine shield makes anyone whose attacks are parried by her get entangled, which I think reduces their attack and defence to 0? The Frost Brand has a cold attack that hits everything in a single square for a decent amount of damage, but we're fighting ice giants so they won't be too bothered by it. It increases her cold resistance too, which she desperately needs. Her horror helmet increases the potency of the fear she spreads, while the chainmail of displacement makes her harder to hit. Her boots and amulet give her very strong reinvigoration, which will prevent her from getting tired.  Niefelheim's god and a small army(I'm unsure if it's their entire army or not, Mictlan told me it was quite small, not much more than 40 giants) are up north. I'm confident Mictlan can kill their forces there if they actually fight, but Pangaea is probably a bit too much for them to deal with.  It looks like Fomoria is stuck on that little island to the west, trapped by Hinnom and Abysia. The next year or so is going to be make-or-break for us. If ilu xuande loses to Pangaea before we can kill Niefelheim, we'll get demolished. If we lose to Niefelheim, which is extremely possible, we'll get demolished. If Pangaea kills Mictlan, they may very well be powerful enough to simply attack us while fending off ilu xuande. I'm empowering a Yogini and another Rakshasi into more powerful blood magic, we'll need more than 2 mages casting rain of toads to do this. Rain of toads is going to become a staple of our offensive actions, without it we'll be toothless in everyone else's dominion. There's another similar spell that requires air and blood rather than nature and blood like rain of roads, called wrath of pazuzu, but it's further in the blood tree than we are able to research right now and I don't think it's quite as effective at spreading unrest. If I were smarter I would've scouted Niefelheim more effectively and found out where the rest of their army is, but I'm an idiot. Hopefully we don't get completely destroyed.
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Aug 26, 2014 20:15
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How much you win (or lose) in stats with Chaos Power? I always thought it was some minor bonus.
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Aug 26, 2014 21:31
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Turin Turambar posted:How much you win (or lose) in stats with Chaos Power? I always thought it was some minor bonus. +/-1 in attack, defense, strength, and precision per chaos/order scale. Every 15 points of unrest counts as point of chaos, too.
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Aug 26, 2014 21:55
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So the bonus from high Turmoil then stacks with unrest to create scary beastly monsters. Neat. I always take Turmoil 3-Luck 3 because reasons, so... Yep. Chaos Power sounds mildly handy. Bet you just love it when you see players with Turmoil scales just begging for your demons to come eat them.
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Aug 26, 2014 22:05
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Bacchante posted:So the bonus from high Turmoil then stacks with unrest to create scary beastly monsters. Neat. I always take Turmoil 3-Luck 3 because reasons, so... Yep. Chaos Power sounds mildly handy. Bet you just love it when you see players with Turmoil scales just begging for your demons to come eat them. It's actually terrible because 90% of the community always takes order 3, so your demons are useless unless you shore them up with lots of unrest first.
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Aug 26, 2014 22:09
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Turmoil and unrest don't stack for chaos power. The maximum is 3 times your chaos power value, which is 1 for everything Lanka has, so +3 strength/attack/defence for everything with it(it doesn't affect precision at least, which makes order Lanka sort of viable, maybe). It loving sucks and everything with it would be better off without it
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Aug 26, 2014 22:10
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garth ferengi posted:Turmoil and unrest don't stack for chaos power. The maximum is 3 times your chaos power value, which is 1 for everything Lanka has, so +3 strength/attack/defence for everything with it(it doesn't affect precision at least, which makes order Lanka sort of viable, maybe). It loving sucks and everything with it would be better off without it Oh does it not impact precision? I could have sworn it did when I played order 3 Yomi. Hey kids, this is how rumors start about dominions 4 mechanics!
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Aug 26, 2014 22:18
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The problem with chaos power is I think the devs expected pillage to be used pre-empting attacks. Because wasting multiple turns putzing around on an enemy border for a nation that wants to be raiding and moving around a lot is totally going to happen.
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Aug 26, 2014 23:39
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A different problem with X Power (because this matters for heat, cold, death and magic, too) is that the turn order does not support using magic to help you out on the turn you attack. So either you have to spray your wad on a bunch of provinces ineffectually, or you telegraph exactly where you're going to attack the turn before.
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Aug 26, 2014 23:43
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I just want to say gently caress you and your lettus play. Just bought Dom4 last night and I'm having a blast trying to get my expansion game down in AI before I dive headfirst into the next open game.
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Aug 27, 2014 01:24
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drat, there's a lot of blood powers (and blood minors) in this game. Lanka, Mictlan, Niefelheim, Hinnom, Pangaea, and even Abyssia
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Aug 27, 2014 02:47
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KirbyKhan posted:I just want to say gently caress you and your lettus play excuse me the proper term is lettuce-play
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Aug 27, 2014 03:36
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Also for all the people who are buying/bought this game recently for whatever dumb reason there's a newbie game starting up right now so you should probably join it!! http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&threadid=3498140&perpage=40&pagenumber=120#post434067643
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Aug 27, 2014 03:44
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KirbyKhan posted:I just want to say gently caress you and your lettus play. Just bought Dom4 last night and I'm having a blast trying to get my expansion game down in AI before I dive headfirst into the next open game. I too picked it up buy have not yet launched it cause distracted by other pretty things. drat modpud and her secret advertising thread. I bet she is lying in a bath of money, from all the kickbacks the creators are sending her for making this thread, just laughing at us. Also I just noticed that your pretender apparently is really big on killing demons, and yet your nation is full of demons. What gives?
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Aug 27, 2014 04:10
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Gridlocked posted:Also I just noticed that your pretender apparently is really big on killing demons, and yet your nation is full of demons. What gives? Would you say no to the orders of a divine being created for the purpose of kicking your rear end?
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Aug 27, 2014 05:48
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Archenteron posted:Would you say no to the orders of a divine being created for the purpose of kicking your rear end?  Do you remember when I said I would kill you last?  I lied Also upon review modpud does point it out also in the first post
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Aug 27, 2014 06:59
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Speleothing posted:drat, there's a lot of blood powers (and blood minors) in this game. if there's not a blood nation or 5 in a game at any given time then something is wrong
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Aug 27, 2014 09:39
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Goons tend to really, really like blood nations because a big part of the current "endgame" of Dominions includes spamming a certain spell which requires blood for it. If you don't have blood, the endgame can become far, far trickier if the enemy nation has access to blood.
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Aug 27, 2014 13:10
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Gridlocked posted:Also I just noticed that your pretender apparently is really big on killing demons, and yet your nation is full of demons. What gives? Dominions 4 is full of wonderful themes like that. LA Marignon in particular is a Spanish Inquisition-themed Christian nation that also makes pacts with the demons of hell to help them stamp out the unbelievers in the name of God. Pittsburgh Lambic fucked around with this message at 13:21 on Aug 27, 2014 |
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Aug 27, 2014 13:19
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Pittsburgh Lambic posted:Dominions 4 is full of wonderful themes like that. LA Marignon in particular is a Spanish Inquisition-themed Christian nation that also makes pacts with the demons of hell to help them stamp out the unbelievers in the name of God. It works fine so long as you watch the demons real close to make sure they don't do anything ungodly.
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Aug 27, 2014 13:48
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Pittsburgh Lambic posted:Dominions 4 is full of wonderful themes like that. LA Marignon in particular is a Spanish Inquisition-themed Christian nation that also makes pacts with the demons of hell to help them stamp out the unbelievers in the name of God. I swear the entire game is about making shaky alliances with stuff that will eat you as soon as fight for you. EA Agartha sealbreaking, MA Ermor, LA Everyone Is A Blood Nation, Tartarians, horrors, et cetera.
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Aug 27, 2014 14:45
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Gaghskull posted:Goons tend to really, really like blood nations because a big part of the current "endgame" of Dominions includes spamming a certain spell which requires blood for it. If you don't have blood, the endgame can become far, far trickier if the enemy nation has access to blood. This seems like a flaw to be honest. It seems impossible to stop a blood nation that has gone late game, if they have invested well into their blood economy. You will be drowned by doom horrors.
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Aug 27, 2014 16:26
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The Gentleman posted:This seems like a flaw to be honest. It seems impossible to stop a blood nation that has gone late game, if they have invested well into their blood economy. You will be drowned by doom horrors. There's a reason the BoT/AC fix mod puts AC up to 266 slaves. Regardless, if you let a B/S nation get to the endgame then you have only yourself to blame. From what I can see, this is countered by them being only okay early game - you need your blood mages for blood hunting instead of reading books, blood doesn't get many good battlefield evocs, and you can't summon too many demons at once. Plus, this is illwinter, so what even is balance.
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Aug 27, 2014 16:53
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Turn 21: Golden Boy, life ain't a video  Mictlan is breaking Niefelheim's siege on their 2nd fort.  Niefelheim hasn't brought a single mage, but Mictlan brought quite a few, not that they really needed them. The weird cloud looking things are sleep cloud cast by their mages which we'll go over in a bit. Sleep cloud gives units inside the cloud a pretty huge chunk of fatigue, if it gets through their magic resistance. They also have a few mages casting fireball, but they don't accomplish a whole lot.    A complete stomp. I think that was probably the vast majority of Niefelheim's army, although their god is still running around on the Mictlan-Niefelheim border. Our invasion should go nearly unopposed. Hopefully Mictlan's army is enough to at least severely cripple Pangaea's massive stack of centaurs, although I'm not expecting much.  Not sure why the sprite never seems to want to show up on the map, but it's in the selected province.  These are mages Mictlan has been recruiting from the throne their 2nd fort is on. They're not particularly great, fire is kind of a lovely path. Astral is great, but astral 2-3 on a slow to recruit mage with only 1 map move is pretty mediocre. Very useful for nations with no astral/fire access though, like us.  Priest Kings are nature/blood mages, with decent leadership. They're sort of expensive, but easy to crank out a lot of if you need good leaders that can also cast whatever nature/blood magics you might need.  These guys aren't slow to recruit(in fact, none of Mictlan's mages are), but they're very powerful blood mages, and holy 3 priests as well, which lets them cast divine blessing. They're incredibly good, for just about everything.  Nahuali are, in my opinion, one of the best mages in the entire game. They aren't sacred, but they can be recruited from any fort with a lab, are fairly cheap, and have astral and nature magic paths, which are some of the most flexible and ubiquitous paths a mage can have. They also turn into turkeys.  We've finally made use of our national summons, this turn.  Rakshasa Warriors are roughly equivalent to, maybe slightly better than, our Palankasha. They cost 5 blood slaves apiece, and are summoned in groups of 5, and summonable by any blood 2 mage, which we have quite a few of, since it's a pretty common path on our kala-mukha. 25 slaves for 5 is almost nothing, our blood hunters are finding close to 50 blood slaves a turn right now, and in a few turns we'll be able to increase that amount further. I'm not sure if we're going to keep summoning for very long, but for now I'm summoning some every turn. We can't afford to hire Palankasha, and they don't have any upkeep.  I'm not expecting any resistance for the first province or two, but it doesn't hurt to be prepared.  Pretty basic, nothing interesting going on.  Vine arrow is just what our yogini will be casting until we research sleep cloud next turn. It's pretty bad.  Our pretender will be casting this. One thing to note about spell fatigue, it decreases drastically if your skill in the required magic path is higher than the required skill. Half if you're one point over, a third if you're two, a quarter if you're three, etc. For our pretender, that means an eighth.  This is what our Raksharaja have been casting for quite a while. It's not great, but it's fairly accurate, hurts things, and fatigues them a little. With ilu xuande attacking Pangaea and us attacking Niefelheim after they just lost most of their army and have had their capital rained on by poisonous toads and will be having more falling on it soon, I'm not super worried about the future. Let's see where my overconfidence takes me!
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Aug 27, 2014 17:03
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ChickenWing posted:I swear the entire game is about making shaky alliances with stuff that will eat you as soon as fight for you. EA Agartha sealbreaking, MA Ermor, LA Everyone Is A Blood Nation, Tartarians, horrors, et cetera. The game fantasy theme is really Dark Ages / sword & sorcery. It's all about demons, necromancy, horrors of an old age, or horrors coming from another world, blood sacrifice, and fun, happy stuff like that. I kind of like it, I always play the bad guys in other games and here I have plenty of choice ^^ It's interesting comparing it to Age of Wonders or Master of Magic or HOMM, where there are good/neutral/bad guys. Here it's more neutral-bad/bad/badder/omgwtfrollforsanity
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Aug 27, 2014 17:05
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The Gentleman posted:This seems like a flaw to be honest. It seems impossible to stop a blood nation that has gone late game, if they have invested well into their blood economy. You will be drowned by doom horrors. One of the things I personally find interesting about the game is that as a pretender to godhood, you kind of determine whether you ascend via a golden age or an apocalypse. Every dom3 game I ever saw ended up being a race between legions of dead gods made sane by powerful magics fighting kings of the elemental planes in a race to get out ahead of something like the Cthulhu end-of-the-world wishers or blood sacrifice nations or, I guess, someone using a full court press of strategy map magic to hollow out someone else's wizard corps--like through burden of time vs humans or something. If you get that runaway blood economy going and flood the world with nightmares, I kind of like the thought that your ascension is kind of the *last* one, and that there's no world left to god over afterwards. Like, you're a god with dominion, and that dominion needs followers to matter, but you just opened the floodgates to the plane of hungry mouths. There's a lot of runaway strategies in the game. It's kind of a game of nothing-but run away strategies, because it doesn't have synchronous resources. Like if you play a 'tug' style game in an RTS, you're guaranteed opportunities to come back at set intervals. I think if you're going to have a game with the kind of hidden strategies that this one does, you'll always end up with a game arc where somebody runs away with it. The alternative is something like Diplomacy where it's impossible to have guile in the structure of the game--only in the moves you make. And this one has both, so that's even crazier. And to chickenwing's point, blood is a slow starter and often has to balance pushing to that high level blood magic with getting other useful stuff on the way. Though, again, if you're mictlan and your sacred troops are good enough to carry you well into the mid game, it's not a big deal. Dom 4 is very much a 'who would win in a fight between a bear and a shark' kind of game. Like, it depends on how deep the river is they fight in, whether the bear is just waking up from hibernating, and how many virgins the shark has to sacrifice in order to increase turmoil in the forest before it strikes.
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Aug 27, 2014 17:12
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What are the random paths on those Adepts of the Golden Order? Also better than 10g per research is pretty good right?
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Aug 27, 2014 17:23
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Xenoborg posted:What are the random paths on those Adepts of the Golden Order? Also better than 10g per research is pretty good right? turkey wizards are 125 for 11 research and they come one a turn. you dont buy a str mage for research.
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Aug 27, 2014 17:38
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Xenoborg posted:What are the random paths on those Adepts of the Golden Order? Also better than 10g per research is pretty good right? IIRC, one path of Fire,Astral,Earth or Air. If you're wondering where the Earth and Air randoms come from, its from the thematically linked adepts of the silver/iron orders, who replace the fire with Air and retrospectively.
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Aug 27, 2014 18:17
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TheCosmicMuffet posted:One of the things I personally find interesting about the game is that as a pretender to godhood, you kind of determine whether you ascend via a golden age or an apocalypse. Every dom3 game I ever saw ended up being a race between legions of dead gods made sane by powerful magics fighting kings of the elemental planes in a race to get out ahead of something like the Cthulhu end-of-the-world wishers or blood sacrifice nations or, I guess, someone using a full court press of strategy map magic to hollow out someone else's wizard corps--like through burden of time vs humans or something. I wish there were more "destroy the world spells" available for people to cast, even solely as a "screw you" development. Astral corruption? Cool. Burden of time? Why not? Freeze the seas? Yeaaaaa. What about gibbering insanity affecting all units? Unleashing a prrscripted ai force wandering the map Devouring the land? Volcanic eruptions in every mountain province? I like seeing "You fool! No!" Become part of the overall strategy.
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Aug 27, 2014 18:57
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Donkringel posted:I like seeing "You fool! No!" Become part of the overall strategy. Oh yeah. It would be incredible if dominions had a quality like Forbidden island, where as you go, more and more provinces become so utterly torn apart that you can't even use them or move through them--as a fallout from what you're describing. Maybe the whole world falls away until all that's left are islands in the void, only able to spit at each other from afar. Sure, it would probably result in more 'draw' matches. Though, frankly, with all the teleporting and summoning and stuff in the late game, I would think it could work fine.
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Aug 27, 2014 19:03
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TheCosmicMuffet posted:Oh yeah. It would be incredible if dominions had a quality like Forbidden island, where as you go, more and more provinces become so utterly torn apart that you can't even use them or move through them--as a fallout from what you're describing. Only thing similar is the domkill nations.
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Aug 27, 2014 19:12
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| # ? Apr 28, 2024 01:29 |
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There's a unit known as the Eater of the Dead. The more units it kills, the bigger and stronger it gets. Eventually it becomes so powerful that it breaks free of your control and goes on an independent rampage until someone kills it.
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Aug 27, 2014 19:14
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