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dunno what this is but im emptyquoting it
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Sep 30, 2014 23:23
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| # ? Apr 24, 2024 23:30 |
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garth ferengi posted:dunno what this is but im emptyquoting it most important question: what are you drinking?
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Oct 1, 2014 02:23
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garth ferengi posted:Since sunshine finally ended at the tragically early age of 60 turns, here's a new pudmod EA game, goldfish! Crossposting! I might maybe make this game into a lettuce play but probably not. It still needs players either way, though
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Oct 1, 2014 02:46
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spoilers.
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Oct 1, 2014 02:47
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Also if anyone guessed that the name "goldfish" was a reference to the laurie berkner song that the children in my class love the most I am extremely willing to have children with them
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Oct 1, 2014 03:05
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garth ferengi posted:Also if anyone guessed that the name "goldfish" was a reference to the laurie berkner song that the children in my class love the most I am extremely willing to have children with them Whaaaaaat? It wasn't a reference to the memory of people who are in Dom4 games? I am filled with shame that I forgot I was in a game for a turn and now check 3 times daily
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Oct 1, 2014 05:28
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Is that a Jelenia Gora province? 
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Oct 1, 2014 21:07
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Tevery Best posted:Is that a Jelenia Gora province? Yes this game takes place in fantasy Poland.
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Oct 1, 2014 21:32
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Turn 51: Bring Them Home  ilu has cast Well of Misery, a death gem generating global that also has a neat little side effect for everyone. He's also finally finished off Pangaea! He's going places!  I've finally freed a Mandeha this turn. The Mandeha are incredible. In addition to being very powerful battle mages, they also automatically cast darkness at the start of each battle, which greatly reduces the attack, defence, and precision of anything without dark vision. Demons all have perfect dark vision. His gear is mostly intended to boost his survivability, I don't intend to have him engaging in melee combat the way ilu xuande is using his dai oni. It's a waste. I'll probably be summoning one or two Mandeha purely because they're H3 priests, which allows them to claim thrones.  I've summoned a trio of these guys this turn as well. They cost 25 blood slaves apiece, are summoned 3 at a time, and I have no idea how useful they are. If I cast a spell called Gift of Reason on them, which takes an N5 mage and 20 nature gems and can be used to turn any unit into a commander, they have 2 50% chances of getting a level in blood magic and 2 50% chances of getting a level in air magic, which is sort of useful I guess, if a bit expensive. As a thug chassis they're arguably better than our dakini, but I probably won't bother with doing that, they're just too expensive and finnicky. I spent roughly an hour and a half scripting our army for the battle coming up. I may or may not have cried several times doing it Turn 52: Nelson Mandeha Crosses Five Passes And Slays Six Generals https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHJcTu5viOI Wow, that battle had a whole lot of poo poo going on! First off, the entire battle was dark due to the presence of Nelson Mandeha, and there was a storm from the very start due to an item I had forged and given to one of our Raksharaja!   Here's Hatwer's god. She's an amazing air and astral caster, equipped with gear partially stolen from our dead dakini. Her stats are quite low due to being outside of her dominion. One of his mages immediately then cast quagmire,  which probably didn't have too huge an effect on the fight, since it just slightly penalised all of our infantry and didn't do too much else. A few turns in our mages, who were all scripted to cast shadow blast, started letting loose.  Now, shadow blast has one important characteristic, that I didn't realise. It's that little part that says (magic resistance negates). Almost all of Kailasa's units, both mages and troops, outside the ogres, have very high magic resistance, to the point where it does almost nothing. I switched from thunder strike to shadow blast in this fight. I expected Hatwer to, with his A9 caster god, cast one of the few shock resistance spells in the game, so I preemptively countered that. Except he didn't bother, and my "counter" was loving useless, and a massive waste of gems. One of the lizard shamans I brought to the fight  was set to cast communion master(since communions and sabbaths are totally compatible, just being blood and astral versions of the same thing), and then relief,  before becoming a communion slave himself. I hoped that this would help our communion survive, and it did, to some extent. I also cast antimagic, a buff that further increases the magic resistance of our units. Kailasa's pretender god automatically casts it on her entire army at the start of every fight, He followed up some of his buffs/attempted debuffs that got turned away by our massive MR with foul vapours, which greatly helped our communion slaves into an early grave.  Foul vapours doesn't do much, but in our situation where our slaves were pushed to the very bring it did just enough to really gently caress us up.  Unfortunately, our overzealous mages and their skelespam pushed our slaves just hard enough that we lost almost all of them. Hatwer's forces had nowhere to run, so he lost all of them, and he suffered higher gold losses than we did(5500 to 7000something, he said) and lost his amazing god, but this was honestly a pretty serious defeat. We're going through slaves far too quickly, and I won't have any more available for some time. And that was just the first battle! The remnants of our forces immediately fought Hinnom's army afterwards!   His mages start by casting horror mark on some of our units, a spell that, well, horror marks things.  His mages then start calling horrors into the fight!  Horrors attack ANYONE who is horror marked, usually the caster who summons them. They also kill everyone else too. They happily murder every single person, wherever they are, and there are about a million different types of them. Finally, one of his communion masters casts hell power.  Hell power communions are a pretty fantastic doomsday device, I've been toying with the concept a little myself. The idea is that, since any self buffs a master casts are immediately transferred to all the slaves, that you just get a huge amount of slaves together and every single slave causes more and more horrors to be summoned to the battlefield. The horrors will annihilate your forces, but hopefully once they're finished with your mages, they'll go on to kill the enemy as well!     His mages route, and, since most of them aren't horror marked since they didn't cast hell power themselves, most of them are able to escape, leaving our army to fight half a dozen horrors.  A victory, but not a great one.  The remnants of Hinnom's army are in Illidar. Kailasa's entire army has been wiped out, but I'm pretty sure he still has a massive stack of mages he's been using to research somewhere that he'll be pulling out. Abysia has taken Florien from us, they might try to break the siege at Haunted Woods but I doubt they'll succeed. Down in the south you can see that AI Ulm's vampire queen is attacking us now, too. We have some new tools available to us this turn. Some very, very important tools.  Remember that spell I talked about Mictlan wanting to cast, way back at the start of the game?  Well, we're casting it. Astral 6, blood 6 is the minimum requirements for it. I have some other, more immediately useful tools, as well.  For the past few turns, instead of, you know, forging items or whatever, I've been alchemising all of our gems into pearls in order to empower dakini in astral magic, in order to cast send horror.  I only have 5 dakini able to send horrors at things this turn, but we'll be getting more available soon. I'm sending 4 at Illidar, and one at Florien. I'm not expecting the one being sent at Florien to be super useful, but 4 horrors will probably wipe out the entirety of Hinnom's high level mage corps. After that, he'll probably only have a handful of mages left. I've also got these guys.  2 are ready this turn, and I should be able to make 1 more every turn until the end of the game. Vampire Lords are amazing summons, their immortality(which only works within our dominion) and stealth along with their powerful magic paths makes them, uh, ridiculous. These vampires that I'll be using have been given two important items.   With these two items, the vampire lord is able to assassinate someone similar to how Pangaea's dryads were killing our commanders. The lifelong protection gives them nearly infinite chaff, and the black heart lets them do the assassinating. They have also been given 30 blood slaves, in order to cast the spell leech to kill just about any enemy mage they might find. If they ever run out of blood slaves, they can just summon hordes of skeletons to kill the enemy instead.
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Oct 1, 2014 22:18
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the mandehas have been summoned and i am satisfied
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Oct 1, 2014 22:35
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Communion Slaves exploding like that is hilarious. The armies of Kailasa had already routed and your Masters just kept on summoning more skeletons. Then pop pop pop pop pop
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Oct 1, 2014 23:07
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Saucy tricks with the send horror-ing Dakini!
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Oct 1, 2014 23:07
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I love the way you can tell when the five turns of scripting comes to an end.
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Oct 1, 2014 23:08
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Speleothing posted:Communion Slaves exploding like that is hilarious. The armies of Kailasa had already routed and your Masters just kept on summoning more skeletons. Communions are basically magical suicide pacts.
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Oct 1, 2014 23:13
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AfroSquirrel posted:Communions are basically magical suicide pacts. I prefer to imagine it going this way: "Okay, I'll help you in this battle, but you have to swear not to overload my mind, I'm trusting you." "Of course I'll take care of you, you're my buddy. Oh poo poo! Need more skeletons, just one more batch to drown those fuckers in a sea of bones! Hahahagahagahaha"
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Oct 1, 2014 23:28
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AfroSquirrel posted:Communions are basically magical suicide pacts. "We scribe together, we die together. Book boys for life." Elite fucked around with this message at 08:42 on Oct 2, 2014 |
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Oct 1, 2014 23:44
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How many slaves and gems were used in that fight? how many mages dead by communions? Such waste, for an enemy army that was 5 times smaller than yours.
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Oct 2, 2014 10:50
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Turin Turambar posted:How many slaves and gems were used in that fight? how many mages dead by communions? By the sounds: all of them!
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Oct 2, 2014 11:48
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Turin Turambar posted:How many slaves and gems were used in that fight? how many mages dead by communions? When you are bigger than everyone else combined, you can afford waste. Lanka can replace all of those slaves easily while Kailasa suffered a huge loss.
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Oct 2, 2014 14:05
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Of course, the scripting system has a lot to do with said "waste", if the options or behavior to define were more granular, she could have made his mage stop casting that much in the later turns when it wasn't needed.
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Oct 2, 2014 14:31
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Turin Turambar posted:Of course, the scripting system has a lot to do with said "waste", if the options or behavior to define were more granular, she could have made his mage stop casting that much in the later turns when it wasn't needed. Like there are people on the official forums who want 15 turns of scripting, plus special assassination scripts, plus ways to repopulate provinces that have been gutted, plus this that and the other, and they're missing the point of the game. You have immense control over certain things, but you're always in an unstable world. Some of that is the (normally) ever-decreasing number of worthwhile provinces, some of that is other people loving with you in a way you didn't anticipate, some of it is your troops and mages being impossible to corral how you'd like. To me, at least, that's what makes the game what it is. Your awful plan against everyone else's.
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Oct 2, 2014 15:07
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Mostly the major problem is the increase in fiddlyness for optimal results. 15 turns of scripting or other special scripts would make the game take so much longer too play. I also wish there was a little more optimization on blood hunting for example. The optimal strategy is very micro intensive and very powerful. The game is complex enough and any change that takes late game turns take much longer is a deal breaker.
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Oct 2, 2014 16:54
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jBrereton posted:Yeah that's also not really Dominions at that point, though. Well, that's all very relative. What's is "really" Dominions can change. From Dominions 3 to 4 they eliminated tax management right? And they added a new formation or two and a new order types in the battle setup, giving the player effectively a bit more of options and control, if they made these changes, they could well do other set of changes in Dom5 and you would be eating your words. I'm sure from Dom1 to Dom4 a few more things changed. Are there hardcore Dom1 fans claiming how Dom4 is not the TRUE Dominions experience, I wonder... I mean where is the limit, if it's your awful plan against everyone else awful plan? You could totally eliminate the tactical battle and abstract them more and depend more of the RNG and pure troop composition... like CoE3, another Illwinter game. Also, Why 5 scripted orders and not 8? But the same question can be asked as "Why 5 and not 1, and then let the gods of chaos rule?" I agree that part of Dominions charm it's to not have total control of everything, your own soldiers and mages choose what to attack inside your very general orders, and all that. Actually I like the idea of having some control in the battles but in the way of previous orders and setup of the army, not with direct control ala Total War or Age of Wonders, it's a good trade-off. But exactly how much control you (the leader) have and how much you don't is debatable, and mutable. From a game design standpoint, it's also a balance between too little micro and too much micro, you can't add up detail and options and orders without any thought. But going up from five orders to seven isn't off the cards, for me. Some way to establish formations (maybe make a squad follow another one while maintaining position) would be nice. Migration between provinces? I could see it as a new automatic feature, not as a player's order, but always if it's done with the attention to detail typical of Dominions, taking in account province supply/resources, temperature, scales, pace of migration, difference of population between provinces, etc. Better gem management control for the mages retardness, the same way the "conservative gem usage*" was implemented would improve the experience, not make it "fake" Dominions. Hell, isn't conservative gem usage also a new option in Dom4?? Doesn't that make battle less awful and random? I suppose Dom4 isn't real Dominions.
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Oct 2, 2014 18:01
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Turin Turambar posted:Also, Why 5 scripted orders and not 8?
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Oct 2, 2014 19:03
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The other real big thing with dominions battle command system is that it's fully we-go. Which is what allows pbem play. Which is what makes it so sensational. Those games with full micromanagement of battles are a ton of fun alone but playing multiplayer and waiting eons for battles to occur that you're not part of can be quite boring.
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Oct 2, 2014 19:55
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I think this is mostly a UI problem. You don't want too many instructions, because, hey, sure, that bogs it down. But you don't have enough control over what should, really, be part of the game. It's kind of cool to drain mages to death for the sake of casting spells. It's less cool to have it done for you. I think the system should be simplified into Tactic, Target, Preferred, and Forbidden. You open your deal, and there's the position interface like before. Your options for tactics are Attack Hold + attack Spells Hold +spells Retreat Hold + retreat Guard Commander Then you pick the target: Rear Large Archers Nearest Maybe throw in more options that are researchable--not the 'commanders' one, per se, but something like 'astral power sources' or 'living' maybe. Then you pick a list of up to Path levels of 'Preferred' spells: So an S1 can remember to be a communion slave. An S2 can remember to communion master and brain attack S2 E1 can remember to comm. master, brain attack, and reinvigoration etc. This let's you pick a big list for an important caster SC, and introduces a new, interesting element to higher level casters; they can remember to *do* more. Or maybe you need to do it like the unadjusted pathes--so the guy who's actually a 3 but has a +2 bonus doesn't get 5. Or maybe it's total levels /2 and agnostic. Maybe it's highest path. You know--whatever. It's an interesting new possibility for balance. Then forbidden list. Don't ever cast raise skeleton Don't ever cast uh... summon storm power. Then the behavior is adjusted; If attack, approach target and attack. If hold and attack, look for preferred spells that are buffs to cast. Then attack as soon as you're ready. If hold and spells, then cast buffs, then cast attacks. Etc for the other options. Stuff on the forbidden list is never cast. If nothing on the preferred list is possible, and the forbidden list excludes your other options, go off script. Then you're not assembling everything in a structure. You're saying 'ok, get this stuff out of the way, and then do something else'. A creature with *less* preferred buffs and hold+attack or cast will start attacking sooner. So you balance the tradeoff of getting on the offensive a little faster with being unprepared. You vastly simplify initial instructions, because now you're just maintaining a list of preferred casts. You could also have a *Default* tactic for each commander type. So that when you hatch your 20th Oreiad she's scripted to twist fate, and spam lightning. Or whatever. The saved tactic menu could also be changed to a drag and drop so you multiselect units, and drag them onto a menu of configured tactics you've got docked in a pane on the right, and you know that they're all on communion slave duty. Or whatever. With Forbidden you can push off the difficulty with stuff like this raise dead spam without ruining the unpredictability of the scripting system; it's still a *little* unpredictable, because, hey, you're forbidding this categorically, and maybe it's not something you want to forbid categorically. Maybe you'll accidentally make an off-script situation because you'll forbid the only viable option and then the unit does whatever. I've been stoking an urge to redo this game and mess with the UI for a while, but I can't fathom what it would take to duplicate the armies and rules.
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Oct 2, 2014 21:18
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Of course a better intrinsic AI for the units would reduce the need of actions and complicated setups for the armies.
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Oct 2, 2014 21:31
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I still like that the units are fairly dumb. It builds up the idea of a powerful terrifying creature trying to become a god. Your worshipers are, through combinations of fear, awe, zealotry, and limited perspective, prone to make mistakes. If it were possible, different personalities or intelligence categories for casters would be intriguing. I always liked the unit behavior/posture toggles in some modern RTSes.
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Oct 2, 2014 21:37
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Turn 53: Tango  Horrors are amazing. Horrors are our friends   Some horrors fight eachother instead of the enemy, when none of the enemy units are horror marked.   It's okay though. Horrors are always displayed as dying in battle reports, when you use send horror.    Now that astral corruption is up, anyone who forges items that aren't blood or casts ritual spells that aren't blood based has a decently high chance of being eaten by a horror. I've left most of our mages forging things, because I don't really care if they get eaten by horrors at this point.  It appears that ilu xuande is finally betraying us. I'm a little sad, but not especially worried. He's far too weak to actually be able to put up a fight. I'm sending horrors at both dai oni on our borders, along with that gigantic flaming guy in the south. I really wish he had just talked to me a little more before doing this.  The north is pretty dull and boring again. I'm empowering more mages into astral, and moving some big stacks into the enemy provinces, but that's it. 2 of our last 5 dakini raiders are attacking Abysia, the rest are attacking Kailasa.  Ur's territory. I have almost no scouts here, but I do know that he is building a fortress in Ermithia. I'm sending horrors at it, to blow it up before it finishes.
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Oct 2, 2014 22:33
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Thread remains good, although I only just realised turn names no longer are Smiths songs
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Oct 2, 2014 23:07
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Dominions is a game where you always want more control over your pixelmans, but ultimately they are their own people who will ruin all your plans with/when given free will. I mean, if we're talking about making changes, they could remove the negative stat modifier for female units, let's not get CRAZY here though.
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Oct 3, 2014 00:15
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scalded schlong posted:Thread remains good, although I only just realised turn names no longer are Smiths songs Obv not crying any more.
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Oct 3, 2014 01:39
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goatface posted:Obv not crying any more. Your profile pic gives me extreme anxiety.
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Oct 3, 2014 02:07
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Kin33 posted:Your profile pic gives me extreme anxiety. Clearly you'd prefer this:
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Oct 3, 2014 03:36
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I love the lack of surprise or shock in the betrayal. It's like a distraught parent. "Son, I'm not angry that you're trying to stab me in the back. I'm just disappointed."
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Oct 3, 2014 15:22
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Kanos posted:I love the lack of surprise or shock in the betrayal. It's like a distraught parent. It's not even disappointment, more like the sadness you feel when you finally have to put your pet to sleep.
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Oct 3, 2014 15:52
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Turn 54: A Day in the Park no_fucks_given.jpg   Our horrors killed Ur's fort in progress on Ermithia, although it was taken back on the same turn by his forces. Now, I've used astral corruption against Nuclearmonkee before. I know how he tries to fight it. From now on, outside of troops hiding inside a fortress(the insides of which horrors cannot reach, for Balance Reasons) he'll be scripting just about everything he has to be set to immediately retreat. Now, this is pretty goddamn exploitable. If I take every single neighbouring province, his army won't have anywhere to retreat to, or at least as of taking this turn that is my understanding of the mechanics of sending horrors and armies retreating. With all that in mind, I am sending 2 horrors each to Ulm's capital and all of its neighbouring provinces, including Ermithia. If his forces laying siege to their capital are set to retreat, and the forces at every neighbouring provinces are small and unable to stop 2 horrors, he'll lose his entire army. Nuclearmonkee might be the best dominions 4 player around(and I have no doubt that he is), but even the greatest player is helpless against a bad player like me who has astral corruption up and a handful of mages capable of sending horrors. Now, about those cool sounding horrors from that battle report...  Umor is great. He's a total heartthrob. He has damage reversal like our pretender, and gets more and more powerful the more he gets hurt I think?  Hruvur is chill as gently caress. He might be like, the coolest, neatest dude I've ever smoked pot with. Seriously, look at him  The only person I would ever refer to as "my bro"  The Hinnom-Kailasa front is totally stagnant. I'm spending most of our gold this turn to put 50 points of province defence at Khaz Dupar, in anticipation of him trying to take it back, hopefully with far too few troops and far too many mages. Our dakinis are going to start raiding Ur, I want to stop the construction of any fortresses he might be building on those thrones.  Another throne for us! This is the one located in Undermountain. It sucks. It's probably the second least useful throne in this game.  The Yomi front isn't looking too bad! I'm moving skeletons west to occupy ilu xuande's territory and am abandoning our blood hunting on this front, all of our western provinces have only a tiny handful of people left in them at this point and aren't really worth blood hunting anyways. Let's see how those horrors we sent last turn did!  This was massive overkill. The scouts reported his forces as having been much scarier than this.  The elemental royalty are pretty high level summons, I've never actually seen any of them before.   His dai oni fled before our horrors could really do their work. Since none of his units are horror marked, our horrors aren't putting as much work into killing the enemy as they could be. Lazy fucks I'm making GBS threads out horrors all over the place at him this turn. Horrors everywhere. Horrors for everyone. Horrors are our friends
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Oct 4, 2014 16:44
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Horrors are the great equalizer as all armies become chaff. Im definitely not the best player around either 
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Oct 4, 2014 16:57
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Nuclearmonkee posted:Horrors are the great equalizer as all armies become chaff. Im definitely not the best player around either Honestly most armies are chaff as soon as battlemagic gets rolling in numbers. Astral corruption and horrors seems to turn mages into chaff, which is probably why mages hate it so much.
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Oct 4, 2014 17:07
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| # ? Apr 24, 2024 23:30 |
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Oh hey it's the .EXE icon for Dominions 3. Way cooler than a seraph imo
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Oct 4, 2014 17:46
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