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Brands with area effects, a fear hat.
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Feb 12, 2017 20:37
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I'm fond of frostbrands but that's because I like playing Neifelhem, but yeah, a brand of some description is good, Vine shield/Frostbrand used to be standard anti pd thug equipment.
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Feb 12, 2017 20:46
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The best thing to have is probably stuff that damages enemies that try to attack you. The second best would be stuff that does AoE damage. You also want fear to rout that chaff.
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Feb 12, 2017 21:36
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Libluini posted:
Is this correct? I thought the only things that influenced upkeep were unit gold cost and sacred status (as well as direct upkeep add/reduce special abilities).
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Feb 12, 2017 21:47
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Its hard to tell from the screenshots, but this game uses a tile system for combat. Each tile holds up to 6 size in units. I think most units are size 2, which means 3 to a square. The area of effect on spells/weapons is how many tiles that attack hits. Firebrands are nice because its a sword that hits 1 unit with a piercing attack, and slams the whole of the tile with a 14 damage fire attack.This is generally enough to clear a tile of human units per turn (so 3). This is great with a fear aura because it causes tons of moral checks. Edit: I just realized how badly I want a board game version of dominions that can be played in ~3 hours.
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Feb 12, 2017 22:08
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Dirk the Average posted:Is this correct? I thought the only things that influenced upkeep were unit gold cost and sacred status (as well as direct upkeep add/reduce special abilities). Ah gently caress, need-not-eat is about supply usage, not upkeep. I'll go back and correct that post haste.
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Feb 12, 2017 22:09
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twig1919 posted:Edit: I just realized how badly I want a board game version of dominions that can be played in ~3 hours. That is a fascinating design puzzle you've put forth. Dominions as it stands only works because it's a computer game and a lot of the extraneous cruft is ignorable or handled by automated calculations, so you'd have to relegate a lot of that stuff to a limited subsystem or remove it entirely. Getting a game down to 3 hour play sessions as a goal would be ambitious. It would be, what, something like settlers of Catan and Risk? Maybe have a deck of random event cards (and you get to draw more each turn/ignore bad events if you have Luck scales)? Or possibly cut that. Maybe have a deck of lesser strategies and effects that you expend research or gems to draw from (pull a Turkeys! card, expend it in a combat move for an advantage)? Or possibly cut that. Maybe have a deck of magic sites that you can site-search to get a draw from? Or possibly cut that. It's probably not a good idea to track individual gem counts, so that would need to be simplified into either an abstraction based on your gem income per turn or some generic 'gem' pool you draw from. There's just so many subsystems and oddball strategies in Dominions that it's hard to know exactly what to cut it down to to fit the framing you propose. Shady Amish Terror fucked around with this message at 22:36 on Feb 12, 2017 |
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Feb 12, 2017 22:34
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twig1919 posted:Edit: I just realized how badly I want a board game version of dominions that can be played in ~3 hours. 
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Feb 12, 2017 22:36
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Shady Amish Terror posted:That is a fascinating design puzzle you've put forth. Dominions as it stands only works because it's a computer game and a lot of the extraneous cruft is ignorable or handled by automated calculations, so you'd have to relegate a lot of that stuff to a limited subsystem or remove it entirely. Getting a game down to 3 hour play sessions as a goal would be ambitious. Haha this is a pretty fantastic thought experiment. I hope somebody's autism is powerful enough to inspire them to give it a shot. Personally, I think that the Dominions "world" is full of unlimited potential as an awesome setting for an RPG. There could be epic adventures traversing the world of Dominions; from the depths of the Smoldercone to the Hall of Firey Justice in Marignon, to the frozen spires of Caelum and the dark, flooded cavern cities of Xibalba. There was actually a thread in the Traditional Games forum years and years ago that was some type of PNP RPG using the Dominions setting. IIRC it was pretty neat, but my Archive skills are weak so I've never been able to find it.
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Feb 12, 2017 23:05
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"Under 3 hours" But yeah there's absolutely potential for a game like this, look at Twilight Imperium for a big thematic game (that takes way more than 3 hours but still.)
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Feb 12, 2017 23:24
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How are u posted:Personally, I think that the Dominions "world" is full of unlimited potential as an awesome setting for an RPG. There could be epic adventures traversing the world of Dominions; from the depths of the Smoldercone to the Hall of Firey Justice in Marignon, to the frozen spires of Caelum and the dark, flooded cavern cities of Xibalba. Imagine the moment where the party is woken up in the middle of the night by a panicking populace because the sun has risen. Then the reaction when the actual sun rises to join it six hours later.
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Feb 12, 2017 23:25
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Triskelli posted:"Under 3 hours" Diplomacy never lasts more than 3 hours before someone "goes AI."
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Feb 12, 2017 23:30
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Shady Amish Terror posted:That is a fascinating design puzzle you've put forth. Dominions as it stands only works because it's a computer game and a lot of the extraneous cruft is ignorable or handled by automated calculations, so you'd have to relegate a lot of that stuff to a limited subsystem or remove it entirely. Getting a game down to 3 hour play sessions as a goal would be ambitious. I think you could probably pretty easily do a tactical-level traditional game that played in under 3 hours, ie, one Dominions battle. You could do all the scripting on cards, and point buy for research and units. It's probably a good idea for a game, really, and now I kind of want to design it. "Plan it out in advance and see how it goes wrong" is an under-used conceit in traditional games, IMO, and is part of what makes Galaxy Trucker fun. You might be able to make the strategic level work in 3 hours or less, but it'd be hard to keep the scope of the game without bogging it down pretty seriously, I think. Making a game that does both and resolves in under 3 hours isn't possible, I don't think. In general, though, I think it's not a good idea to make games with two dependent subsystems like that, because it's often the case that one of them ends up being way more important than the other. Even in Dom 4, it feels to me like the strategic layer renders individual battles tiebreakers in a lot of cases, though I do think it does it better than most equivalent games and that accounts for a lot of what makes it good. I've only ever played like one MP game and read all the rest in LPs, though, so I could certainly be wrong.
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Feb 12, 2017 23:51
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Shady Amish Terror posted:There's just so many subsystems and oddball strategies in Dominions that it's hard to know exactly what to cut it down to to fit the framing you propose. Have you ever played the civilization board game? I would go with something like that game, which lasts 8-10 turns for 3 hours in most cases. Basically, each nation can have a chart with their unique units (cost/stats/ect) and spells on them. Then you make generic "tech cards" that you buy using research points (tracking rp on a slider). These cards can have the spells that you get in each teir. Armies can be represented on the map by little flag pieces, with special tokens for each pretender god. The battles can be determined by adding up units stats/ect. and rolling dice. Many of the mechanics will transfer over great, battles could even be pretty involved affairs with a board and turns ect. The two things that will really differ is lot of the crap units will have to be removed (streamlining to a reasonable number of components) and balance will have to be introduced. Edit: Linked the wrong civ game. I never played the Avalon hill one. twig1919 fucked around with this message at 07:31 on Feb 14, 2017 |
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Feb 13, 2017 00:04
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It doesn't have the grand strategy aspect, but for a chaotic game of slinging magic around (and getting "gently caress all of you" awesome spells), I really like Argent the Consortium. It's a worker placement game, but it really captures the ramp up and absurdity of spells in a similar fashion to how Dominions starts out with lovely little spells and ends up with apocalyptic ones. It also helps that the victory conditions are hidden and only revealed by going after a specific resource (which itself may be a victory condition; all victory conditions are in the vein of "collect the most of X"), so someone who appears to be losing may actually end up winning the game. It really helps to prevent people from checking out of the game when they know they've got a fighting chance right up to the end.
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Feb 13, 2017 00:05
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twig1919 posted:Have you ever played the civilization board game? I would go with something like that game, which lasts 8-10 turns for 3 hours in most cases. Basically, each nation can have a chart with their unique units (cost/stats/ect) and spells on them. Then you make generic "tech cards" that you buy using research points (tracking rp on a slider). These cards can have the spells that you get in each teir. Armies can be represented on the map by little flag pieces, with special tokens for each pretender god. The battles can be determined by adding up units stats/ect. and rolling dice. Many of the mechanics will transfer over great, battles could even be pretty involved affairs with a board and turns ect. The two things that will really differ is lot of the crap units will have to be removed (streamlining to a reasonable number of components) and balance will have to be introduced. We could I have to say, much as I love the Civ computer games, I think they went too faithful with that one, and it is ultimately not a very good game. The combat minigame especially takes too long and kind of sucks, even after they changed it up in one of the expansions, and they'd have been better served abstracting it more.
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Feb 13, 2017 00:13
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Ultiville posted:I have to say, much as I love the Civ computer games, I think they went too faithful with that one, and it is ultimately not a very good game. The combat minigame especially takes too long and kind of sucks, even after they changed it up in one of the expansions, and they'd have been better served abstracting it more. Its fine with the 2nd expansion. I don't think the game is even playable in base or 1st expansion, but 2nd expansion is actually pretty good. They fired the original designer and got a competent one to actually fix the game. The biggest problem for me is culture still being a little too strong, but they toned it down a bit in the 2nd expansion. Also, it takes you more than 1 minute to play the combat minigame? There isn't much decision making to make. twig1919 fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Feb 13, 2017 |
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Feb 13, 2017 00:43
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twig1919 posted:Its fine with the 2nd expansion. I don't think the game is even playable in base or 1st expansion, but 2nd expansion is actually pretty good. They fired the original designer and got a competent one to actually fix the game. The biggest problem for me is culture still being a little too strong, but they toned it down a bit in the 2nd expansion. If you give people choices to make, they'll tank over them. That's my critique with a subsystem like that where there aren't many meaningful choices but there's still a lot of mechanical nonsense happening. It shouldn't take more than a minute to resolve, but it also isn't importantly different from more basic resolution mechanics in many ways either, and the ways it is different mostly serve to obfuscate the actual impacts of your actions.
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Feb 13, 2017 00:51
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Ultiville posted:If you give people choices to make, they'll tank over them. That's my critique with a subsystem like that where there aren't many meaningful choices but there's still a lot of mechanical nonsense happening. It shouldn't take more than a minute to resolve, but it also isn't importantly different from more basic resolution mechanics in many ways either, and the ways it is different mostly serve to obfuscate the actual impacts of your actions. When combat is something that only happens a couple times a game, I don't really see it as a problem. There are some interesting mind-games involved sometimes with the mini-games. Maybe I am just lucky because I play with a group that doesn't have chronic sufferers of analysis paralysis. There are other groups that I wouldn't touch a game that required any decisions in it. people who would take 5 minutes to figure out if they were throwing rock or paper. Don't get me wrong, there could have been better combat. Its just not something that I would say that tanks the game. If the combat is going to take too long, your already playing with the kind of people that simply can't handle any complex strategy board game.
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Feb 13, 2017 01:30
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Ultiville posted:"Plan it out in advance and see how it goes wrong" is an under-used conceit in traditional games, IMO, and is part of what makes Galaxy Trucker fun. See also: Robo Rally. e. oh and also the way combat works in Kemet! You have a handful of cards with various combinations of attack and defense values, and when you fight you pick one to play and one to discard. When your hand empties you get your full set back. So you pick a card, and you can secretly add enhancements to it if you have any. Then you and your opponent play each of your cards face-down, and simultaneously reveal them and any enhancements you added. The cards modify the values of the troops you had on the table and you can immediately determine losses, and a winner of the battle. It's a really quick and elegant way to have both the relative sizes of the armies, and the blind strategic decision-making ("scripting") matter, while also adding in an element of resource management (use your best card now, or save it for later?). And it takes like one minute to resolve a battle so it doesn't take over the game. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 08:19 on Feb 13, 2017 |
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Feb 13, 2017 08:16
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This is on sale today on Steam for $20. Ill probably give it another try and attempt a newbie multiplayer game
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Feb 13, 2017 19:35
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Ultiville posted:I have to say, much as I love the Civ computer games, I think they went too faithful with that one, and it is ultimately not a very good game. The combat minigame especially takes too long and kind of sucks, even after they changed it up in one of the expansions, and they'd have been better served abstracting it more. Wrong Civ board game. There's Sid Meier's Civ Board Game, which is meh, and there's Avalon Hill's Civilization Board Game from the 80s, which is what he links, has almost no combat mechanics, and is all about negotiating, trading, and managing to recover quickly from disasters.
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Feb 13, 2017 20:07
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Yessod posted:Wrong Civ board game. There's Sid Meier's Civ Board Game, which is meh, and there's Avalon Hill's Civilization Board Game from the 80s, which is what he links, has almost no combat mechanics, and is all about negotiating, trading, and managing to recover quickly from disasters. I think the former was at least two distinct board games? I have the version from the Civ III era (it kind of sucks) and apparently a new one was made later
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Feb 13, 2017 20:26
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Turn 59 Turn 59 begins with hitting Enchantment 8. Enchantment 8 unlocks some pretty potent battlefield buff spells (like Fire Fend, which gives your entire army Fire Resistance) and some summons like Lichcraft (Liches, obviously). There are a little over 13,000 points to go to Enchantment 9 and we are now pulling just over 4000 a turn. We’ll be there in 4 turns, very exciting!  We summon a fresh Vampire Lord (Meshech) and our fourth Arch Devil:  He has a giant flaming sword, how neat. We also summon one of the Elemental Royalty. The Elemental Royalty are a set of unique summons each with a corresponding elemental theme. There are 3 Queens of Elemental Air, 3 Queens of Elemental Water, 3 Kings of Elemental Earth, and 3 Kings of Elemental Fire. One of the Kings of Elemental Earth became corrupted by Blood magic, and so he is summoned via the Blood school:  We will forge some Earth and Blood boosters for him and send him up towards the battle front, I’m sure we’ll find something useful for him to do. Oh look, A Dire Portent  Man cast another global spell and in doing so knocked our Stellar Focus off of the list. It didn’t even have the chance to pay for itself yet!! Let’s see what bullshit Man put up: loving lovely. Well, Man quite clearly does not intend to go quietly into that good night. Vengeful Waters is a super annoying spell that has a chance to trigger an assassination attempt on any of your commanders with a water elemental (varying size, dependent upon geography and temperature) as long as they’re within the hostile Dominion. A couple of our scouts deep in Mannish territory got hit immediately. Here’s a pretty standard small water elemental:  Strong enough to kill many commanders and mages. And here’s a scout unfortunate enough to be in a very Cold province:  Even worse! This global used to be a game-winner because it used to send a full-sized, massive water elemental in every single attack. Now you only get those big boys if you’re actually underwater or on the coast, but it is still supremely annoying to fight in Vengeful Water Dominion. THANKFULLY our strategy is based on pushing our own Dominion, so, if Enchanted Forests isn’t going to cause us a headache then Vengeful Waters shouldn’t do much either. Maybe it’ll slow down Pan’s mighty army a tad, that’d be cool. I’m still salty about Stellar Focus going down.  We also get a report from Knobville:  Wasting gems .png Looks like Man has a Flame Spirit or Wizard or some other Fire mage throwing i, a level 3 Evocation spell that throws fire bolts at a province. It is honestly pretty much a waste of Fire gems, so nice going there, Man. So, Man’s solo Golem attacks a new province:  Striking crossbowmen for massivedamage. There was no blood hunting going on in Summerbay, so there also weren’t 120 wolves available to slowly chip away at the Golem’s HP. Our PD is defeated handily, and I am sure that the Golem will move on to some other random province next turn. Annoying, but we will stay focused on the real fight. Like the storming of the fort in Asanon! Here’s Man’s fort defenders:  A dozen or so Magisters, Lizard Shaman, and Ivy King to cast Howl, plus a couple dozen Knights and longbows. Not a bad defense, but here’s our Vampire Squad:  We lust for Man death! Seven Vampire Lords, 100 lesser Vampires, and three Yeddeoni ready to drop Earthquakes. Man’s mages cast self-buffs and his Ivy King does indeed cast Howl. Our Vampires are set to hold and attack, so they sit for the first round while the Lords raise skeletons. One Lord casts Rigor Mortis:  Little purple clouds = eventual death to the living. This spell is lethal to most living armies. Every round of battle half of the entire field is hit with fatigue damage. A living army will eventually all fall unconscious, while undead such as Vampires just keep on keeping on. The next round the Earthquakes come:  Maybe a third of Man’s mages bite it, and many more are wounded. The Vampires begin to attack:  The brave Knights are quickly overwhelmed, and soon it’s over, Asanon is ours:   Vampires that die in battle in friendly Dominion don't count as "dead" on battle reports, thus the terrible disparity between the two sides. We also take Xibalba’s final fort in White Water. That’s the end of the game for Xibalba, RIP you lovely bat-men.  Our Vampire squad is moving down to Man’s province Villia, where we now have 6 candles of Dominion. We’re also moving the huge blob of men we have sitting in Camia over to Villia as well. I want to crack the gate in Villia ASAP, we need to pick up the pace. We’re still pushing Man’s Dominion down, so I don’t expect the globals he’s put up to become any more effective. That said, I want to put his capitol to siege and kill his Pretender God before he can make any more mischief. 
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Feb 14, 2017 04:00
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Won't Rigor Mortis also lock up your own earthquake-casting mages? Or are they likely to get off their heavy magic before they get KO'd and take a nap for the rest of the battle? Secondly, are liches worth summoning? Because liches are cool.
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Feb 14, 2017 10:07
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PurpleXVI posted:Won't Rigor Mortis also lock up your own earthquake-casting mages? Or are they likely to get off their heavy magic before they get KO'd and take a nap for the rest of the battle? They'd get their earthquakes off well in advance, which is all they're there for. Liches are as useful as any death mage, which means they exist to skellyspam.
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Feb 14, 2017 10:29
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PurpleXVI posted:Won't Rigor Mortis also lock up your own earthquake-casting mages? Or are they likely to get off their heavy magic before they get KO'd and take a nap for the rest of the battle? Their own earthquakes will probably knock them out well before Rigor Mortis does.
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Feb 14, 2017 15:39
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Pash posted:Their own earthquakes will probably knock them out well before Rigor Mortis does. If I'm not remembering completely wrong, How Are U hooked his mages up with some flying items so they'd be immune to their own quakes. 
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Feb 14, 2017 15:51
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PurpleXVI posted:If I'm not remembering completely wrong, How Are U hooked his mages up with some flying items so they'd be immune to their own quakes. I'm talking about the fatigue casting Earthquake generates. They are KOing themselves just from casting.
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Feb 14, 2017 16:18
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Lichcraft is mostly useful for getting a high-d caster for rituals. Battlemagic is secondary.
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Feb 14, 2017 16:36
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Looking at liches, they seem pretty meh when how are u already has vampire lords. D4 doesn't look much when compared to D3B3 and flying on the vampires.
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Feb 14, 2017 20:02
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Zernach posted:Looking at liches, they seem pretty meh when how are u already has vampire lords. D4 doesn't look much when compared to D3B3 and flying on the vampires. They're not as good as Vampires because Vampires are stupid, but they can still be worthwhile. The jump to D4 gets you access to powerful battle magic like Life After Death and Soul Vortex without having to carry around a booster, and they cost a different resource so you aren't really choosing between them.
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Feb 14, 2017 20:34
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Liches have D4 so they can forge both the normal D boosters, which can be useful. You do get them pretty late, though.
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Feb 14, 2017 21:33
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Yeah, "Liches aren't as good as Vampires" seems basically like "chocolate cake isn't as good as devil's food cake" because even if you're right it's still cake
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Feb 14, 2017 21:40
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D4 means you're easily hitting D6 (skull staff then skullface), which opens up a whole lot of options, and battle magic gets seriously nuts once you go past 4 in a path. There are only 4 death spells that require more than D6, and three of those are D7.
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Feb 14, 2017 22:59
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Cerebral Bore posted:Liches have D4 so they can forge both the normal D boosters, which can be useful. You do get them pretty late, though. Too late.
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Feb 14, 2017 23:10
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goatface posted:Too late. Well, yes, in virtually every case this is true.
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Feb 15, 2017 00:10
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Zernach posted:Looking at liches, they seem pretty meh when how are u already has vampire lords. D4 doesn't look much when compared to D3B3 and flying on the vampires.
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Feb 15, 2017 00:57
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You use the D gems for your repeated castings of BoT
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Feb 15, 2017 01:23
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goatface posted:You use the D gems for your repeated castings of BoT It's difficult to find blood slaves in provinces with no population.
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Feb 15, 2017 03:34
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