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Chomp convinced me to buy this game. That may have been a mistake. I've been reading the manual and I think that I'm going insane. Send help. (At least I'm used to the overall style, since I played and liked Conquest of Elysium 3.)
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Mar 5, 2015 20:47
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I... don't get it. Maybe I don't understand province defense.
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Mar 10, 2015 01:44
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PD seems great in theory if it's used as the quickest of quick-reaction forces. I guess it just doesn't work after a point since the generic units are so poor compared to mageballs and main recruits?
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Mar 10, 2015 02:25
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Nuclearmonkee posted:Marshmallow Trick is a good game. My snake god got killed by hill wizard steve hiding in some slingers on turn 4 and this just popped up in my cap. Guess we're in good company then. loving shark tribe tritons...
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Mar 25, 2015 18:42
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I'm still alive in DomOnSale, do I qualify as a newbie? 
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Mar 30, 2015 22:40
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I will continue being content being on the other side of the map.
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Apr 10, 2015 10:35
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Bacchante posted:Ahahahaha, I just got wrecked in DomOnSale. I'm not even mad, it was pretty funny. Isn't that kind of normal when you stale for something like 4 out of 5 turns?
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Apr 10, 2015 20:18
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Enjoy posted:I was asking whose stealth armies, I didn't use any Bacchante is Mictlan in the game being referenced. Not Caelum.
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Apr 12, 2015 19:56
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I Love You! posted:Yeah, the main problem with blood is that it's balanced around everyone in the game understanding that lategame blood is the best thing you can do but that you have a very clear window every game to beat them up first with minimal resistance. If you don't spawn next to blood nations, you have to bank on the people that did actually doing the right thing and attacking the blood nation in the early and midgame where they are typically mostly defenseless. You can lose to a blood nation simply because a bad player NAPed them instead of ganging up to easily kill them and devour their lands while they were setting up an otherwise useless blood econ. Hi I make peace with nuclearmonkee while he's playing a blood nation.
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Apr 19, 2015 03:10
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Keep calm and continue sandbagging. I'm okay with it.
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Apr 19, 2015 14:32
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It would be pretty neat to have a tempo that rose in the mid-late game and then deteriorated from all the world-shattering spells being thrown around to the point where people are scrabbling over scraps. Sort of the classic Starcraft endgame when the map starts to get mined out.
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Apr 21, 2015 03:13
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Kitfox88 posted:Game where domkill nations are forbidden and everyone's required to take Death 3. This but unironically.
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Apr 21, 2015 04:17
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DomOnSale has ended in a throne victory for Helheim (me). This game was an absurd gut-wrenching up-and-down ride towards the end. I ricocheted back and forth between being full confidence and total despair for something like 12 turns (roughly when I settled on going for a quick throne attempt). If I hadn't pulled off the throne win when I did, I feel quite confident that Fomoria (GoodEyeClosed in IRC) would have eventually ground out a win due to his total dominance in research and gem income. C'tis (Enjoy) did an excellent job of sussing out that I was going for the sudden-death throne win, and was in position to stop me each time. The first time he handed me my worst defeat of the game - turns out that air-breathing troops being led by a Gift of Water Breathing commander die when they rout, since they become disconnected from their commander. That was a big pile of sacreds that died trying to defend my southern underwater throne from skelespam. I think that I lost more sacred cap-only cavalry to that battle than I lost during all of my previous wars combined. Enjoy also timed his later land attack correctly to stop me when I made my second effort to win on throne points, but it turns out that air mages are much, much stronger on land than in the water. Plus this time I made sure to put my elites in front of the PD so they wouldn't rout due to chaff casualties. I'd already beaten off Abysia's and Fomoria's main counterattacks during the turn before; they'd been at war with each other so their troops were mostly out of position when my throne attempt was revealed, so it was mostly down to C'tis. Though I must admit that having Fomoria's elemental royalty and a few of his summoned mages come charging at me was an unpleasant surprise - and indicative of how the game likely would have gone if it had continued. I don't think that I could have waited any longer to make my gambit. Endgame map: Fomoria in the north/northwest, C'tis in the west/southwest, Ulm in the south, Abysia smack dab in the middle (kudos on surviving in that position btw), and Helheim in the east. Also AI Ermor on the Ulm/Helheim border.  How did we end up at such a point, though? I only have part of the picture, the eastern picture, so I'd love it if some of the other participants could share how events played out in the west. Here's my pretender:  This being my first game, I had very little idea of what I was doing in pretender design. I'd figured out that Glamour stacked well with high defense, so I knew that I wanted a major water bless. I'd read that Thunder Strike was amazing, so I wanted at least A4 so that I could cast Storm. Other than that, I had no real plan going in. Exploit blessed Helheim sacreds to expand well, make air quills to bolster my research, and then leverage mid-game magic and maybe some equipped thugs in order to... something? I had some vague notion of going for Vengeful Waters in the late game, but that turned out to be a laughable prospect for my cost-inefficient researchers. If I did it again I'd probably go up to Cold 3, take Sloth 1, and invest those points in either Growth 3 or Magic 3. My early- and mid-game was really framed by choices made by other players. My initial neighbors would have been Marverni (ENesbit), T'ien Ch'i (Verr), and Ur (Killjore). Ur's other neighbor AIed very early on, while Marverni had his expansion stunted by Abysian assassins and T'ien Ch'i staled a couple of times and got invaded by Ulm (Stallion). This meant that Ur and I had the entire eastern third of the continent between us. As Helheim, I knew that my armies were likely strongest in the early-to-mid game and that Ur's greatest strength was in mages - which require research time to ramp up. My choices were either to invade a neighbor who was already down (but not yet out), or take the fight to Ur - who would only get stronger (and who had, at this point, actually claimed more land than I had - not physically, but in border agreements). I would never be in a stronger position relative to Ur than right now, and a war was inevitable sooner or later, so I re-drew our previously-agreed borders and launched into a full-scale war when he objected and attacked. Many things happened during, and after, the war with Ur, but the general pattern stayed constant: I kept Marverni as a buffer on my flank (albeit a "buffer" that invaded me once, but I compromised and made peace - I could quite rightly point to the fact that his other neighbors were going to gut him if he sent all his troops to attack the one peaceful border he had) while I slowly ambushed Ur's raiding armies, raided Ur's backfield with Valkyrie swarms, and eventually rolled up Ur's land as the balance of army strength shifted more and more in my favor. Marverni eventually wound up throwing his armies at Abysia, losing, and being partitioned between Abysia, Mictlan, and I (though I only re-took the land I'd previously ceded to Marverni). Mictlan was then partitioned between Fomoria and I (with me getting Mictlan's share of formerly-Marverni land). Crucially, because I was the only neighbor who wasn't beating on him, Marverni sent me his gem and gold reserves right before going AI. This included an enormous pile of Astral gems, which I used to empower a Crystal Sorceress to S2 and start casting Acashic Record to gather info on how people were doing. My war with Ur was either over or about to be over at this point, so my income was shooting up from all the captured provinces and I felt fantastic about my prospects. I had an enormous stretch of land with excellent strategic cohesion, I had multiple Amazon tribes to break me into Water, Nature, and Astral (plus Crystal Sorceresses who could Communion and participate in the Thunder Strike fun), and I had the troops to make some excellent thugs with my new magic diversity (and indeed, I wound up fielding a bunch of Vine Shield / Frost Brand / Horror Helm ponyman thugs - Marverni's gem reserves helped make mass production of equipment possible). I thought that I was on top of the world, and was mostly afraid that my three neighbors (Ulm, Abysia, and now Fomoria) would realize how far ahead I was and gang up on me. That's another reason I started casting Acashic Record: I was desperate for a boogeyman of some sort to break up any potential alliance against my seemingly-dominant position. And then I saw Fomoria's graphs.  This is a screenshot from that turn; Fomoria is in purple, I'm in grey, and Abysia and Ulm are fairly intuitive colors. I hadn't seen C'tis' graphs yet, but his research was comparable to mine. It turns out that Fomoria was already crushing us in every magical measurement possible, with twice as much research and gem income as second place (me) and his research rate was increasing far faster than anyone else's (indeed, by the end of the game he had something like three or four time the raw research compared to second place). I didn't find an illusionary boogeyman to play up as a distraction; I found an existential threat that might already be impossible to defeat. This is when I contacted C'tis for the first time, looking to build a coalition against Fomoria. C'tis was, at the time, finishing up a successful war with Caelum, but he instead signed a NAP with Fomoria. When I heard about the NAP, my mind was made up: there was no way to win a conventional war with Fomoria. I'd had throne points in the back of my mind since the latter stages of my war with Ur, and had been working to get into the water via Manuals of Water Breathing (enabled, again, in part by a nature empower from Marverni's gem gift). If I could get the two water thrones, and it looked like I would, then I had a very real shot. Only 6 points were required to win, and I knew where both of the 2-point thrones were located. One had been on my original border with Ur, while the other was in Ulm's territory - and by now, thanks to the graphs, I knew that Ulm had no magical firepower whatsoever. I could beat him. Easily. If i could get to 2 throne points from small thrones, then I could easily snap up the 4 more required to win in a single turn of claiming - hopefully winning without anyone, especially Fomoria, seeing it coming. It almost worked out exactly as planned. C'tis either figured it out or already had the same plan in motion, and he took away one of my water thrones on the turn that I claimed the big thrones. That bought a good 4 turns of time while I scrambled to take Abysia's eastern throne. Still, my ponies had just enough in the gas tank to make it over the finish line. When I submitted the final turn I'd spent, forged, or combat-allocated every single gem in my possession - all towards holding the thrones. Independent revolts were going uncrushed, Fomoria had started taking away my water possessions, and even AI Ermor was steadily chewing through my southern provinces. I'd bet pretty much everything on the throne play. It worked, but if C'tis' land army had broken mine on that final turn then I would have had no realistic chance of coming back. The final battle:   If it had all come crashing down, my probably-futile plan was to convince C'tis to ally against Fomoria once I was no longer threatening a throne win. I doubt he'd have done it; I think Enjoy's plan was a throne win of his own, which would have meant invading my core provinces to take the 2-pointer in the middle of my territory. I can't imagine any way that either of us could have overcome GoodEyeClosed's magical advantages if neither of us could win a quick throne victory. I don't know how GEC pulled into such a research lead, honestly - I thought that I was doing quite decently on research with my Amazon Owl Quill factories, but it was dwarfed in comparison with Fomoria's research. I suspect that at least part of it was how heavily both C'tis and I used our mages in combat - skelespam for him, glamourthugging and thunder striking for me. I avoided fighting Fomoria as much as I could, and my scouts were never in quite the right position during our division of Mictlan, so I never got to see him fight a major battle. I can only imagine that he relied much less on combat mages than we did. Here's the ending research graph to illustrate the point:  That's a lot of RP. Gem graph:  Not bad there, either. I feel fairly good about my strategic decisions this game, though newbie mistakes in tactics surely abounded. I think that I chose the correct targets and correct allies. I know that I love playing Helheim. Glamour is an unbelievably powerful ability, especially in a strategic context. Unless you're actively in combat, nobody can be sure of where your armies are. That forces people to either act extremely cautiously or take enormous risks. And then Helheim adds the glorious cherry on top of the delicious *heim glamourcake: Valkyries. Valkyries are currently my favorite unit in the game. Much like Glamour, Flight is a huge advantage in both tactical and strategic contexts. It provides immense flexibility, opens up vast offensive options, and gives you an early tactical answer against artillery-based army compositions. The amount of uncertainty you can sow in an opponent is superb. Glamour + Flight is pure distilled bullshit and I love it. Corbeau fucked around with this message at 09:57 on Apr 23, 2015 |
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Apr 23, 2015 09:45
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Enjoy posted:The other water throne was only 3 provinces away from me. Yeah, but you'd have to fight Fomoria for that land - and it was only a 1-pointer.
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Apr 23, 2015 21:05
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Enjoy posted:Which was the other 2 point throne? The one sitting in the middle of my land and the one in Ulm's land were both 2 pointers.
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Apr 23, 2015 21:23
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Enjoy posted:In that case after I took the second sea throne I probably would have taken Abysia's throne, it was adjacent to me The one that Fomoria was sieging?
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Apr 23, 2015 22:31
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Enjoy posted:Yep Might have worked, though it'd still have been tough to take him on. Nuclearmonkee posted:Were the thrones unforted? I would assume waters were but were the land ones as well? Once you get further into the game you should always fort all of your thrones to give yourself at least one free turn to respond if someone rushes your thrones. Ulm's throne was unforted - I don't know why - and the underwater thrones were unforted. Abysia's eastern throne only had a Palisade because it had belonged to Marverni, so it was quick to take. Corbeau fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Apr 23, 2015 |
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Apr 23, 2015 22:42
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Neruz posted:e; Now we need a theme game where you are not allowed script your mages So where's the CoE3 thread?
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May 5, 2015 04:06
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And don't loving leave random land connections between non-adjacent provinces for no reason. Ports are okay, but I'm still salty about that one province in garbageidiot that absolutely should not have been adjacent to Niffle's cap.
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May 12, 2015 18:51
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Go ahead and post criteria for "good" maps and I'll go look up Dom4 map formats. This can't possibly be harder than the CK2 map generator I was working on.
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May 12, 2015 20:25
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Experimenting with basic algorithms to province connections: I think this is decent - the trick will be in making the provinces roughly the same size afterwards. Got an idea though.
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May 13, 2015 03:08
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fool_of_sound posted:The map generator that comes with the game isn't that bad. You could generate and touch up dozens of maps in the time it would take to code a new generator from scratch. I know it's cliche, but... e: I think the greater problem is that every time I start on a project like this, I want to just make a Totally-Not-Dominions game that doesn't have to use Illwinter's horrible GUI conventions. Corbeau fucked around with this message at 03:17 on May 13, 2015 |
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May 13, 2015 03:13
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That's the reason why each province is assigned more than a single "hex" in the grid: this way the provinces are generated with around 4 to 8 connections (not accounting for water/mountains yet, of course) rather than being a strict 6-connection hexagon. Visual granularity and noise will come with the conversion to pixels.
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May 13, 2015 04:29
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Well that's one way to start a new page.
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May 14, 2015 02:37
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Meanwhile Bogarus and I raid each other with horrors and teleporting void summons. I anticipate a decisive encounter within the next several ice ages.
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May 14, 2015 21:56
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Man, I don't even get to see what happened on the turn I lose? That's a little obnoxious. I wanted to see if my earthquake defense inflict any damage in garbageidiot. 
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May 16, 2015 00:35
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Boing posted:I'm pretty sure you can, if you log into the game on the turn after? Nope, I was not able to log in to Berytos to see the last turn. I don't know why. I was hoping to delay until I could get RoS, but you managed to pull together too many besiegers. Plus I was hoping you were still on evocation spam.
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May 16, 2015 18:17
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 Now generating tiling pixel maps (seen on the left). Next is refining shapes and adding province centers. After that, terrain types and actual textures. Corbeau fucked around with this message at 03:00 on May 18, 2015 |
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May 18, 2015 02:56
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Did the Dominions IRC explode? If so, is that a regular occurrence?GenericOverusedName posted:But where's the giant swaths of lovely ocean?! Don't tempt me. e: Actually I haven't decided how to determine oceans yet so suggestions are welcome. Corbeau fucked around with this message at 18:55 on May 18, 2015 |
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May 18, 2015 18:38
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Why won't you just work, borders!? Whyyyy... Also pictured: skype call summoning me to play league of legends instead of finish debugging.
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May 20, 2015 22:20
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I'm also logged into battlenet and steam as well as LoL. I just perpetually keep all of the clients online in the background.
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May 20, 2015 23:55
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Progress. Probably hosed up the details regarding tiling though. e: Yup, tiling broke. I know how to fix it, I just don't want to. e2: Fixed it. I'd been taking a sloppy shortcut and knew it, so I went back and fixed it. Every time something goes wrong it's pretty much always a data structure issue. 
Corbeau fucked around with this message at 04:17 on May 21, 2015 |
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May 21, 2015 02:30
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I'm open to suggestions on aesthetic style if you can give visual examples. What sticks in my mind is the Myth map: Nothing's set in stone yet though.
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May 21, 2015 17:03
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Now determining province centerpoints (represented by lovely flag sprites because single pixels don't show up well for screenshots): Might need to alter the weighting a little bit. Corbeau fucked around with this message at 22:14 on May 22, 2015 |
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May 22, 2015 22:12
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Well it looks like rubbish, and I have confirmed that the Dom4 auto-detect neighbors is not to be trusted, but at least I know that the format is acceptable. 
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May 23, 2015 00:47
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Everyone decided to kill blood and ignore the enormous Roman mega-expansion. I saw it, but I have the defense that I was one of the blood nations being insta-killed.
Corbeau fucked around with this message at 21:19 on May 27, 2015 |
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May 27, 2015 20:51
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My memory is poor but that might have been kinda my fault. I may have sent my blood slaves to Pan before Boing stormed my cap.
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May 27, 2015 21:13
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Lord Koth posted:edit: Let's just leave it at this map was terrible to the Nth degree and move on. This map was the reason I started working on an alternative map generator. I'm still salty about it.
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May 27, 2015 21:35
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fool_of_sound posted:and whoever was playing Burritos. Hi.
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May 27, 2015 22:03
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 17:36 |
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Being unlikable and/or offensive in this game is a good way to hand your neighbors free land. In all seriousness, Dominions is basically Diplomacy with hidden information on how well people are doing.
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May 27, 2015 23:20
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