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Yeah, anything that does a good amount of fire damage or targets magic resistance with a potential instant-win effect can chump the Troll King. He's a beast aside from that though. Now, the King of the Deep, there's a commander who gets owned easy. One lucky exploding damage roll and a Lost an Eye result, and he's just a big piece of mobile cover 
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Sep 1, 2021 01:38
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Flavahbeast posted:do the fellowship of the ring do anything if you leave them alone? I'm pretty sure they just wander around picking fights until they die. Cute little Easter egg though.
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Sep 2, 2021 09:26
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Midgame kobolds can give other factions a huge headache specifically because of their lovely troops, and the abovementioned spellcasters - they can easily afford to throw away waves and waves of expendable meat shields while their casters indiscriminately blow everything up with little fear of friendly fire due to their inherent immunity (unless they're fielding armies of mixed colours for some reason). Kobolds are awesome at both causing and shrugging off lots of incremental attrition. They might not be able to put together an all-comers doomstack that bulldozes everything it ever meets, but they don't need to; while that super army is trudging along, they're running circles around it capturing stuff with three big expendable armies, all of which they can probably afford to lose, and none of which the doomstack can crush without risking meaningful losses.
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Sep 2, 2021 16:07
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Oh my god do people actually let battles play out at that speed? I always set the animation speed to the highest and also mash S whenever there's a fight.
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Sep 3, 2021 00:59
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Dwarf Queen is loving excellent with a northern start, none of their units give a poo poo about snow. 3-cost movement in forests sucks rear end for Dryad Queen though
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Sep 4, 2021 19:27
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Donkringel posted:Summoned a Rune Smith and it chose a feebleminded and blind dwarf worker. That was a reload. lmao that rules
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Sep 5, 2021 03:00
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Witch is one of the scariest all-comers armies in lategame, simply because she has a really good mix of extremely tanky summons, regenerating summons, assassination attacks, extremely strong spells, access to an immortal main commander (!), and hordes of expendable chaff. She only seems to have trouble against enemies that are heavily poison immune and absolute assbeaters against massed units and big juggernauts alike (late Necromancer), or that are simply unstoppable in general (late Warlock). I just finished a really good game myself as Druid. I didn't realize how baller that faction could be. Rush ancient forests, spam the Heart of the Forest and freespawn rituals to passively capture and defend forest nodes, do mid-level summons until you get a Sacred Moose to turn all your freespawned/charmed animals primal, and then work towards getting a fully promoted druid and filling out their top-level rituals. At that point you can calmly teleport between ancient forests, causing them to constantly freespawn Shepherds (Stupid, forest-stealthy roaming ents that continuously passively animate trees in combat and can calmly rip most independents to shreds) and occasionally summoning Beholders and other nightmarish multicasting commanders, all while your secondary armies endlessly scoop up free animal troops and scout around for enemy armies/citadels to drop your mage-heavy doomstack on. Plus you have constant vision of half the goddamn map due to all the flagged forest tiles.
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Sep 6, 2021 17:45
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A commander's spot in the formation is inherent to that specific type of commander and will only change if afflictions or equipment alter it.
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Sep 9, 2021 22:59
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Witch + Enchanter. The Enchanter leaves the forests alone, the Witch lets the Enchanter take some of the swamps she made out of farms and make them into clay golems. If poison spam can't kill something, a big fuckin' wall of clay golems and a few beefier constructs probably can. Baron + Burgmeister. Baron turns swamps into farms and mops up brigand lairs, Burgmeister turns the farms into hoburg villages. They both throw fuckoff huge doomstacks at anything that pisses them off. Dwarf Queen + Pale Ones. Share scrying to efficiently find and divvy up mines, use burrowing units to connect the underground dwarf hub to a larger cave network, conquer the underground together and pop out of the earth like cooperating trapdoor spiders. Don't flood Agartha though. Enchanter + High Priestess. gently caress it, hail Satan, just loving convert every node on the goddamn map into more units
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Sep 11, 2021 00:52
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avoraciopoctules posted:Warlock and Druid might have some synergy. All Warlock needs to do is stop burning down forests for slightly more convenient strategic movement. Druids don't care about lakes, hills, or gem income, so you can do lots of map upgrades. Might be a problem in late game if you start spamming hundreds of Stupid air elementals, I guess. Enchanter + Dwarf Queen. Just tested it and the dvala does in fact multiply the extra iron from a friendly Enchanter's animated tools.
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Sep 11, 2021 22:17
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It's not even that he's a bottom feeder; it's that he can spend the early game focusing on building up his team's economy, while his teammates do the patrolling and fighting. Once all the iron nodes are doubled up, the Enchanter wanders along behind friendly armies, scooping up an ever-growing katamari of wood golems and the occasional clay golem, claiming a mine or settlement here or there in exchange for joining any dicey battles to throw his massive wall of resilient golems up front and cast powerful support spells everywhere. Enchanter's major weakness is that he has a hell of a time getting his poo poo up and running while also competing with enemy factions for territory. He's lousy at fielding good secondary armies and pretty slow to start; with teammates to cover both weaknesses, he can steadily build into an absolute terror, and accelerate his friends' advancement at the same time. He's not a bottom feeder, he's a force multiplier. Donkringel posted:I'm not sure I understand this one, does the friendly enchanter just drop some of the animated tools off in the dwarven mine while a Dvala is there? That's pretty much it, yeah. A fully-grown Bride of Dvalin or whatever takes those three +1 iron bonuses from the tools and like... quintuples them. She gets a double-digit increase in her iron per turn, forever, in exchange for the Enchanter spending three turns and thirty iron. Or until someone conquers her mine, which is frankly not likely to happen anymore lmao With that to look forward to, the Dwarf Queen can easily afford to just give the Enchanter some of the mines she conquers so he can build up his own war machine; he's already given her the ability to churn out arbalests without breaking a sweat, so it's not like she particularly needs any mine she isn't planning to colonize. Angry Diplomat fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Sep 13, 2021 |
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Sep 13, 2021 23:45
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You can also get into Agartha and Hades if you can obtain a unit capable of burrowing or descending through earth (or a portable hole or two). Hades access is pretty much solely limited to necromantic rituals and units that can plane shift though, so unless you can get a Hades travel scroll or some ethereal undead or something, you might be out of luck. Not even the "wandering spirits invade Elysium" event opens a pathway to Hades. I wonder whether a Demonologist could open an Inferno portal in Hades? Could be a fun co-op project to collaboratively conquer hell and turn it into a Super Nexus that grants access to every plane.
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Sep 15, 2021 14:04
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Necromancer can have his apprentice follow PK around reanimating dead slave soldiers, scoop up all the Longdeads, and use them to recruit a ton of (extremely scary) Bane Fire troops.
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Sep 17, 2021 13:03
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Tolth posted:I feel kind of tired of fighting the AI now, so on this topic - what are the best factions for pushing into the other planes and beating the "bonus bosses"? Warlock. Very late-endgame warlock is probably the most all-around powerful faction there is, and has access to swimming, flight, tunnelling, and pass through earth, as well as probably some other planar travel nonsense I've forgotten. Necromancer is best if you specifically want to gently caress around in Hades, as it's a bitch to get to otherwise. Barbarian is decent for it but can't use Planar Swap, which is absolutely essential for hilariously bullshitty Hades shenanigans. Demonologist is solid if you specifically want to gently caress around in Inferno, both because they can open a portal there and because they can summon the big fuckoff boss demons out of there, which is almost essential if you want to make headway (some of those guys can and will wipe the majority of your army within the first couple of turns). If you want guaranteed access to the Celestial plane, I think you pretty much need to be the Voice of El. Good luck actually conquering anything up there though, as angelic beings are ironically kind of a hard counter to you. Void exploration is completely impossible if you're not a High Cultist throwing around commanders with void sanity such as star spawn, and merely near-impossible if you are. You're golden if you manage to find the spire and conquer the Nexus atop it, though, as that plunks you squarely between the Elemental planes (and thus gives you direct or indirect access to most other planes). I'm convinced that the ideal approach is a cooperative game between factions. In particular, I wonder whether Enchanter can portal-link citadels in different planes.
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Sep 25, 2021 17:01
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"There can be no ruler as long as roaming Gods are destroying Elysium."  e: nevermind the eldritch doom gods accidentally blew themselves up while terrorizing a bunch of confused archers Angry Diplomat fucked around with this message at 00:24 on Sep 26, 2021 |
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Sep 26, 2021 00:04
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S w a y z e posted:One thing I'm curious about are the various sorts of worldwide effects that can trigger and drastically change the game. The biggest one is obviously The Apocalypse, but in this version supposedly there's an Antpocalypse. Also one time I got a Cthulhu themed asteroid that fell and I went to go unsuccessfully kill. Anybody know of any other good ones? Off the top of my head: Cultists open a portal to Inferno. Demons continuously pour out of it, razing settlements and rounding up sinners, then bring those sinners home to their ovens to make more demons. This persists until somebody manages to destroy the portal. Some rear end in a top hat builds an evil statue that channels the power of Hades. There will be dispossessed spirits absolutely loving everywhere until someone breaks the statue. Evil Times. A bandit king has risen to power and there will be bandits all over the place for a while. Usually seems to end on its own pretty quick, probably because bandits suck poo poo so it isn't long before something eats the bandit king (he's just a slightly tougher bandit who hangs out in a castle with a bunch of other bandits). The veil between worlds is thin. If you do any magic rituals your commander will probably get horror marked. This is Extremely Bad. You can wait it out though. The event, not the horror mark. If you get marked it's time to write up your will. Spooky fog covers everything. Your vision radius is zero in most areas. This is exactly as annoying as it sounds. The various gold mine events. There are lots of different boss monsters that can randomly show up there and they're all loving horrible. Beholders, ancient dragons, horror olm posses, etc. There are also the lesser seasonal events, like fungus years, bumper crops, droughts, forest fires, visiting merchants, etc.
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Sep 26, 2021 05:25
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That's pretty much Scourge Lord's whole deal - he drains everything into a lifeless desert. High Priestess' endgame is similar, in that summoning Ba'al does extremely bad things to Elysium (he rapidly drains and corrupts everything near him) and some of her other endgame summons produce local heating (i.e. melt snow, cause forest fires, kill people over time, and bake everything into wasteland). The most spectacular is definitely the apocalypse, though. If you want to gently caress up the whole world and make everyone really annoyed with you, there's no better choice than Voice of El
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Sep 26, 2021 21:47
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And if you're opportunistic enough, downgrading settlements isn't even that much of a trade-off to begin with, since you can just scoot into enemy territory and turn THEIR villages into giants while leaving your own intact (gotta maintain that sacrifice income). Then, by the time they come rushing back to stop you from eating their villages, you already have a doomstack that they can't safely attack. High Priestess is rude as hell.
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Sep 27, 2021 13:38
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The giants are basically sacrificial tanks, so yeah they're not as nuts as some units - but they don't need to be. They're large and have a good chunk of HP, which lets them soak up a disproportionate amount of enemy hostility while the High Priestess uses her scary magic and various ranged units to shred enemy armies. The whole High Priestess army list is quite strong and, in my opinion, pretty tightly designed. Which is why she's so frustrating to fight against as a more gimmicky faction like Enchanter e: I suspect that giving HP a slight chance of summon hostility would do a lot to balance her against other factions. That way she'd be incentivized to build up her core army a little bit before spamming a billion summons, rather than just snowballing like crazy the instant she saved up enough sacrifices to cast her first big ritual. Angry Diplomat fucked around with this message at 14:02 on Sep 27, 2021 |
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Sep 27, 2021 13:59
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Yeah, Beholders are among (and are arguably the best of) the Druid's lategame summons. It's best to check their spells before sending them into a fight, as they're not shy about nuking tons of friendlies to kill a single enemy spearman the holy poopacy posted:Yeah but they're buried in a huge random summon list, hope you like trying to fight off gods and elemental royalty with a hundred million moose and boars while you desperately try to roll for beholders Don't have to fight anything if your opponents' big doomstacks are busy slowly wading through a shitload of freespawn in an effort to make headway against your multitude of self-capturing forests! (Not applicable to Warlock, High Priestess, and Demonologist due to their fire-causing summons, but if you let any of them start slinging endgame summons you're probably hosed anyway unless you're an equally hellish class) Angry Diplomat fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Oct 3, 2021 |
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Oct 3, 2021 17:16
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retpocileh posted:Just started playing a few days ago, Voice of El is awesome. Yeah Voice of El is fun. You do have to get used to using some kinda nonstandard tactics (opportunistically preaching in enemy territory with sacrificial bishops, relying on conversion/banishment in the absence of damage spells, converting independents and scooping up flagellants to save on recruitment so you can summon the Spanish Inquisition), but as soon as it clicks, you get... well, that. If you enjoy destroying the world, give Scourge Lord a shot next. Now you can be the all-consuming locusts!
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Oct 21, 2021 15:36
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I'm pretty sure that's not supposed to happen. Is there a shoal or whatever? Little rock path you can walk over? Those can be really easy to overlook
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Oct 24, 2021 12:37
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Grevling posted:I've been playing this game on and off since release. Somehow it took me this long to visit most of the planes and be able to conquer even the gnarlier ones. Dwarven ballistas just clean up You should see what an animated ballista assembly line can do  Enchanter is hands down the best faction for invading other planes. It's the only one with which I've ever successfully conquered Heaven, though making significant headway in Inferno and Hades remains an absolute nightmare simply because they're so loving huge and always endlessly spawning more assholes. (And the Void of course but I mean... lol. Don't go to the Void)
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Aug 22, 2022 16:24
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90s Cringe Rock posted:the void is cool, actually. Yeah it's definitely cool, but any attempt at exploration or conquest is invariably doomed to failure. If you want to see what kind of godawful poo poo is down there, you pretty much have to play High Cultist and walk some summoned commanders off the edge of the world, since no other faction (that I know of) has access to commanders with void sanity. Alternatively I guess you could conquer the Nexus and send Ether Lord squads hopping into the spaces between elemental planes. Either way, though, you're still dealing with an entire plane that rapidly causes insanity, randomizes every army's coordinates every turn, and is overflowing with Horrors of every level, so uh, yeah. Good luck
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Aug 22, 2022 21:00
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Donkringel posted:He lasted for a really long time actually. He wasn't killed, he ended up getting charmed by something. Makes sense, now that I think about it - Troll King is hard as gently caress to kill, and horrors don't generally inflict much in the way of fire damage. If it hadn't been an enslave/confuse that did him in, my money would be on an eventual Soul Slay or similar effect. Some of the monsters that live down there are goddamn horrific. Like, "oneshot or mind control endgame-level Demonologist summons" horrific. You manage to kill Nyarlathotep and think you're hot poo poo, and then you meet the Slave to Unreason and realize, too late, that ol' Nyarly must have been the youngest sibling
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Aug 22, 2022 22:06
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Philthy posted:Picked this up on Steam from the half off sale, along with Dominions whatever. I'm really enjoying it! The thread title totally nails it. It feels like an old Empire game I played on my Amiga in the 90s. I had no idea the battles were all automated, which makes this even better because I usually suck rear end at that part. I do wish I could arrange the formations, though. If the hell gate's on an island surrounded by ocean, it shouldn't be too much of a problem - though you might want to give it a very wide berth during winter, if the ice forms a bridge to the mainland. Only some demons can swim or fly, and if a demon army has even a single unit that can't do either of those, it'll just hang around on the island forever (until the aforementioned ice-bridge forms, at which point, well, all hell breaks loose ).While Dominions has spells and items that allow commanders to safely escape from combat, CoE does not. If you won that fight, that specific dryad queen is dead. However, you haven't actually defeated that AI until you either capture every one of its strongholds/recruitment spots or kill all of its commanders. Dryad Queen is kind of notorious for having tons of commanders and freespawn troops after a certain point, so that'll be a bit of a grind, I'm afraid. On the bright side, you do immediately win the game when all rival players/AIs are eliminated - so if the demon horde pours onto the mainland in the winter, you might be able to just hunker down in your strongholds while they and the Dryad Queen's forces thin one another out. The inferno portal is essentially a Doomsday event - those demon armies really don't gently caress around. If you can't close the gate (which tends to be REALLY hard unless you do it very promptly, as the demons in Inferno are constantly rushing towards the gate and will thus come pouring into Elysium almost every turn), "just bulk up the garrisons and outlive everyone else" is often a perfectly viable strategy. Baron is particularly good at that, with his longbowmen, tower guards, and big batches of free troops. Angry Diplomat fucked around with this message at 18:21 on Aug 31, 2023 |
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Aug 31, 2023 18:17
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Yeah unless you're playing an herb/fungus faction, from the moment you first see a Dryad Queen army, you pretty much want to start burning down ancient forests (or turning them into oak golems I guess) at the earliest opportunity. If you can do so during summer and let forest fires wipe out some of the surrounding forest tiles, so much the better. Trying to win a give-and-take war of attrition against lategame DQ is a nightmare unless you outright destroy the nodes she needs.
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Sep 2, 2023 17:41
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The trick to Dwarf Queen is that she's really really good at constantly scouting around and opportunistically snagging vulnerable nodes, because she can spit out expendable little patrol squads both cheaply and often. As soon as you to catch on to the idea of only ever fielding a) those expendable harassment squads or b) massive invincible siege-and-conquer doomstacks (rarely bothering with anything in between), her style of play suddenly feels a lot more intuitive. This also helps with your "too many workers" issue - just make more captains and send your workers out five or ten at a time to bully levies or whatever. What's especially neat about her is that her lategame strategy is basically just to keep doing the same thing, but with the ability to offset almost anything that could hard-counter it. Physical-immune enemies? Throw a doomstack full of enchanted ranged units at them; nothing is immune to the magical dwarven gun line. Great warlock of fire? Bulk up your defensive siege doomstack (you can always benefit from more Really Big Crossbows) and then, if necessary, chase him around with a large harassment force featuring a bunch of fire-enchanted guards; either he attacks you at home and gets eradicated by 20,000 siege-phase bolts before he gets to take a single action, or he eventually has to contend with a mobile gunline covering behind lots of angry fire-resistant superheavy infantry. Meanwhile, you're taking more mines and gaining more iron and more gems and more dwarves. There's almost no problem that Dwarf Queen can't solve by either throwing a really good siege force at it, or doing some gem rituals and then throwing a really good magic siege force at it. Now, if you ever want to try a faction that also likes to take and upgrade mines but in a much more complicated, drastically more micromanagement-heavy, and significantly harder-to-win-with way, I heartily recommend Enchanter
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Sep 7, 2023 17:06
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Enchanter can eventually field some pretty solid big chungus assbeaters, but they're all ultimately expendable. Except clay golems. Those guys are good as hell
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Sep 20, 2023 05:22
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