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I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002
Oh dear the game where I go a bad gimmick and don't even look at what the modded gods do front and center

There are actually a bunch of good players in this game, which makes it even worse

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I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002
I'd like to point out that Atavi Archers are actually quite good for their cost and are fantastic if you are fighting lightly armored things and/or using flaming arrows as they are stealthy, cost few resources, can be recruited en masse at a moment's notice and have forest survival to make getting around the map easier. The stealth aspect is really the key though as you can shuttle them through enemy lands and showing up to a fight with 100 more archers than the enemy expects can be crippling, especially with either Flaming Arrows (to light arrows on fire) or Destruction (to destroy enemy armour).

But Lanka doesn't do much of either of those things so maybe they won't make much of an appearance.

I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002
To be fair, the reason your armies look like that is because you are the nation of Ur, and you are going to be casting the spell Destruction. A Lot.

I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002
Jags arent, on their own, better than many other sacreds. It's the fact that they take jack for resources and can be recruited from ANY fort that really matters, since most great sacreds are capital-only.

I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002

Gridlocked posted:

Sadly this does not improve my confidence in my ability to learn it.

Well unlike DF it's actually a game.

Ho ho.

(It's not that hard to learn it's hard to figure out what all the spells and poo poo do and how to do WELL, come on people)

I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002

Neruz posted:

They're conj 6 to get them as permanent units though (I think there's a spell that lets you summon a couple temporarily in battle?) so they don't come into play until later.

But Fomoria is already so freaking good that having the amazingly awesome Morrigan is really just icing on the cake.

Hitting conj6 is pretty easy on a nation that already rules and gets amazing skele/tstrike spam options.

I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002
Yomi is particularly borked in the Awesomeish Gods mod since their one real Solid Thing they do that other nations have trouble dealing with (Recruitable borderline SuperCombatants in their Dai Oni) are now facing down a huge multitude of ridiculous blesses and even more absurd Pretender God SCs that dwarf their petty stats and magic paths. When absolutely everything has a crazy double bless or obscene scales and gods freecast/freespawn ridiculous things every round or combat the whole Oni gimmick sorta peters out quickly, not to mention comes online really late.

I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002

Agent Kool-Aid posted:

i want to get la pythium working one day by cranking out lamia queens who will efficiently crank out lamias. they're some good poo poo, and asphodel's paths give them access to a lot of neat stuff.

gently caress blood, nature 4 lyfe

LA Pyth is a really good nation

I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002
It's still a good idea to ally with people before a game if you can get away with it, meta-gaming is the core of dominions

I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002

Neruz posted:

Straight up if you can only have access to one path of magic, you want access to Air. It is hands down the best path to have. All the other paths have things that they are good at but air has everything.

Good buffs? Check. Good battlemagic? Check. Good rituals? Check. Air magic is the bomb.

I mean that or death. EA C'tis gets by pretty well for itself.

I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002

Istvun posted:

Perhaps, but if that nation got 1, 3 and 5 in the path I'd want air, no question.

I'd still consider death. Skelespam beats t-strike and isn't that much worse against other poo poo.

It depends on the troops at that point.

I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002
Yeah to put it in perspective, a lategame raiding force of 1-2 D3+ guys and 3-4 D2 guys is sufficient to plow through almost any amount of PD and even small armies.

It will also wreck small amounts of mages since skelespam reaches a critical breakpoint long before other battlemagic. So they can't just bring along an equal-sized army with a handful of mages to stop you, they have to bring a mini deathball or at least a comprehensive blenderarmy. That's when you add in another 2-3 D3+ guys and 3-4 D2 guys and step things up again.

Death stacks very well with Death, you'll find.

The D2 guys are helpful to spread out from North to South on the battlefield to give you a good strong line and fatigue out everything while stopping lone squads from punching through to your mages. The D3 guys you want in an area that you want to try to jam through troops or fatigue things the heaviest or where you want to draw the most spell fire. Usually this will be nearer the center of the map, though if you're cramming on rigor mortis and using other living troops as line fighters you may want 1-2 around the edges so when everything passes out your skeles can still wrap around and butcher sleeping guys instead of getting stuck behind your living meat.

I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002

Agent Kool-Aid posted:

there's actually a spell that lets a caster transform itself into various critters. sometimes you can luck out and get something like an ettin chassis but with good magic paths, but other times it'll be something halfway worthless.

either that or their brain is fried in the process.

They can also just legit explode.

I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002

Sulla-Marius 88 posted:

You keep saying you're not going to attack ilu xuande. I'd just like to state for the record here that I don't believe you. Not one bit. Maybe not immediately, but a couple pretenders down you're going to be singing a different tune. I can feel it in my bones!

Why must you doubt the power of friendship??

I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002

Elite posted:

I think my favourite diplomatic manoeuvres are when someone sells their services doing something that they wanted to do anyway. I don't think it happens much in Dominions, but in other games where military strength has a weaker correlation with economic strength it can happen.

e.g.

Player A is dominant in tech/economy.
Player B is dominant in military and plans on attacking Player A.
Player B presents itself as an army for hire and highlights A's superiority to players C, D, E who take the bait.
Player B gets paid multiple times for the same job, when they would've happily done it for free.

It almost never works out as cleanly as that, but you get the idea.

This is how I just recently won a FFA game of dom4. I was about to attack my nearest neighbor. I was by far in the lead. The very turn before I did someone offered me 100 gems (!) to attack that very person, rather than them, because they saw how far in the lead I was.

So I did. Because I was already going to. The very NEXT turn, the person I attacked offered me 2,000 gold to stop attacking and go after a 3rd party. I happily accepted on the condition that I not give back the provinces I took in my 1-turn war.

This was very helpful to my longterm plans you see. By the time everyone else in the game formed an alliance to attack me at once I had way too much poo poo to care.

I Love You! fucked around with this message at 16:17 on Aug 25, 2014

I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002

jsoh posted:

i gave you a hundred gems mostly because i was fuckin dead and i like you and i wanted you to win,

It was the 2,000 gold that really made me lose my poo poo.

The worst part was when the other side finally forged the alliance to gang up on me (Which wasn't many turns later, so I was basically given 2k gold to fight the guy who gave it to me), that neighbor broke his truce with me and I ended up swallowing all his lands up in 2 turns. But he gave me fair warning, and I basically told him "you have the best lategame versus my nation. You can beat me later potentially, but not now. I'm giving you a choice: you can stay on my side and fight against this alliance and snap up all the undefended territory around you, or you can be my nearest enemy and be guaranteed to die right now since i have 100 ponies on your borders and want your lands and have to fight you guys SOMEWHERE."

He chose the latter, which I'm going to be honest, about 80% of goon diplomats would chose. But it's the wrong choice! You never, ever, EVER want to be the nearest neighbor in a massive attrition fight versus the winning player in a situation like this, especially when you aren't very big. You will lose all your stuff in the first wave, and then other people will take your stuff in the second wave. No matter who wins, you will be out of the game.

It is possible, however, to jam research and sandbag and steal as much as possible from the other players trying to play hero. This is the evil and devious thing to do and it's generally the right play unless you really like playing kingmaker.

In short, while sometimes you have to form a coalition to bring someone down, don't do it when you're absolutely guaranteed to suffer the vast majority of casualties for no gain whatsoever. You're better off forming a truce and hoping the player gets weakened while you gain some turf and research a solution to their problem.

I Love You! fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Aug 25, 2014

I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002

Xander77 posted:

You're describing... err, one of the common game theory dilemmas, whichever one. Nobody wants to be the first into the breach, but someone has to be the one, else the strong player will just keep getting stronger.

The solution, such as it is, appears to be to keep playing with more or less the same people and build some sort of trust / reputation that will prevent people from simply hanging back in hopes that other will do their work for them, for fear of being mistrusted the next time around.

It's different though, when you are the person in a totally indefensible position where other players (including the winning player) will have enormous incentive to plow through you in order to make the rest of the fight easier. In the situation I'm describing, everyone shared maybe 1 or 2 border provinces with me at most, most of which were unimportant and no where near any of my forts, except the one player, who was literally right next to my capital with 2-3 ways for me to invade him unopposed. It would take me maybe 4 turns to wipe him off the planet, which was as long as it would take everyone else to even bring troops to bear against me, and even if I was defeated his provinces were between me and my other foes so they would be heavily incentivized to absorb him in the process of invading me after I had killed all his troops and mages (which I did).

He was by no means out of the game if he simply stayed neutral or joined my side, but absolutely was out of the game if he joined the other side. There was really no conceivable way he could have gained power or territory by warring me as my most defenseless, easily-killed neighbor, especially if he stretched his forces thin by moving them into my territory, but that's exactly what he did. Which is unfortunate because he really did have the potential to simply cut troop production, snap up territory from anyone I beat up, and research really hard with his excellent mages to gun for a lategame coup or a global fight versus my research-starved ponies.

Don't be that guy!

I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002
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.

I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002

TheCosmicMuffet posted:

Still, it seems like at least having the possibility to do a tower-defense-esque strategy where you don't field a substantial army, but, instead, focus on spell casting enemy armies into oblivion as they penetrate your dominion could add some interesting variety. Plus someone mentioned rituals being kind of uninteresting right now, and setting up to have some kind of spell-based airstrike capability could be interesting.


Uh this is literally how I've won half a dozen games against other good players. It's super viable and I think modpud won like 3 straight games doing this. Have you even SEEN astral corruption/send horror or vengeful water or any of the various tower defense spells?

I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002
Now everyone knows I can be bought out :(

(I can be bought out)

I Love You! fucked around with this message at 21:46 on Aug 28, 2014

I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002

PotatoManJack posted:

I always enjoy getting into Dom4 games, and I can generally get to mid game as I have a lot of the basics down, but past that I tend to start flailing a bit, as I really can't be bothered with a lot of the micro management that needs to take place. I'll inevitably forget about some mages I have sitting somewhere outside of my capital or won't realise I lost a commander in some army that was quite important, and so the number of small mistakes that I make end up adding up and bringing me down.

Further to that, I'm generally too focused on summoning/conjuring or damaging spells and forget to focus on some of the more important buff or global level spells.

All I really want to do is summon cool dudes and then put funky equipment on them and send them into battle :(

Then dom3 is the game for you!

I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002
I'm not going to lie going Niffles without nature bless is almost always a real bad plan

I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002
I am going to go ahead and reveal the motive behind that negotiation blockade: it is the fact that Nuclearmonkee is a good/smart player and by the time modpud's armies reached his borders there is absolutely no way there could be anything but war between them due to how big she'd have to be/he'd have to be depending on where the borders met.

The only reason outside of trades (probably not happening) to negotiate at that point would be some sort of peace (he'd never agree to anything like that with a blood nation that has 1/5 the map) or coordinating an attack on a 3rd party (he'd have no reason to do what she wanted and would be actively conspiring against her/me by then).

At this point there can be no peace between the south and the north sides of the map. That much is a given.

Mightypeon posted:

Messing with the head of whoever is fighting flavah is propably the exactly last thing I would do in this situation.

There are at least 5 very skilled players still kicking in this game at this point, and I would not say Nuclearmonkee is at a disadvantage vs. flavah without knowing more about their actual forces. Flavah has a long dom3 pedigree and is particularly deadly in the early game but monkee has played significantly more dom4 and has a high win%, and tends to pull out lots of combat spells and tactics that no one has really seen before.

I Love You! fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Aug 31, 2014

I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002

Turin Turambar posted:

What I would like is a mini-balance mod to balance the units. I'm saying "mini" here, I know there are thousands of units: there should be touched only the 2% that feel most unbalanced. Between them, some of the units I would like to touch up are the best blessed units. You know you have a balance problem if your army is just 100 soldiers of the same unit type, and actually it's the most efficient thing to do. Even with a bless strategy being valid there should be more in troop composition than "just amass x type of unit". Ideally to win battles a more balanced army should be used. But I think it really comes down to making more important changes in how combat works and that would be for Dominions 5, with luck.

There almost always is more to troop composition than "mass x type of unit". At the higher levels of play that's virtually never correct to do. A mixed army is almost always better in virtually every circumstance except when you're dealing with, say, specific powerful summons.

There are a lot of "bad" units, however.

I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002

Gridlocked posted:

I tried out Lanka today and found out they can raise skeletons and poo poo for free as a religious action. Either I missed something for the Lizards or I am now really jealous of the monkeys.

See the level 5 enchantment spell "Horde of skeletons" which no nation is better at casting than EA C'tis

Also see the level 5 enchantment spell "Pale Riders"

Now make 1 billion mages and spam Pale Riders out of battle and Horde of Skeletons in battle, and top it off with the level 6 enchantment spell "Rigor Mortis" (takes a gem or two to cast in battle).

Congrats you are playing EA C'tis correctly!

I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002

Xenoborg posted:

Don't forget Foul Vapors, takes a nature gem but murders everything but undead and poison resistant(which all your lizardmen are).

Yeah, but EA C'tis doesn't have free access to Foul Vapors like they do all the skelespam and rigor mortis spells.

I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002

Gridlocked posted:

Thanks for the tips guys!

I have been doing some reading and I think my pretender needs to boost my health and defense of my sacreds, perhaps as a mobile spell caster to make up for the lack of diverse spellcasters EA C'tis has? Or have I assessed this completely wrong

You should ignore your sacreds completely. You want scales and/or early expansion. Your strategy is Skellingtons and Rigor Mortis and Mages Mages Mages spam forts Mages.

I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002

Gridlocked posted:

I know none of the shortcut keys :downs:

You will never be able to raid :(

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I Love You!
Dec 6, 2002

Nuclearmonkee posted:

This is true and you should exploit the gently caress out of it where you can cause your neighbors will too.

Also sailing.

Also even if you could be caught it would be incredible. You're spending a scout turn to rain of toads a capital and steal money in respectable quantities. And you can repeat it over and over and worst case scenario you eventually lose your 8 gem investment (guess what fire gems are valuable now). Raiding is one of the strongest abilities in the game hands-down and implementor axe is maybe the single most busted item/spell in the game.

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