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Leperflesh posted:Speaking of. It's an annoying lore inconsistency that several rituals limit how many undeads you can make in a province to the number of corpses available, but in combat there is no limit. I realize "skeletons" are from older bones than the fresh dead, but you can raise unlimited zombies etc. in combat too, if the combat lasted long enough. I think this is balanced by you being able to use rituals to summon more wights to the world then have ever existed, given enough time and gems.
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Feb 16, 2017 22:31
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On the other hand, the fact that the world of Dominions goes through an apocalyptic god war on a semi-regular basis should mean that there are plenty of bones to reanimate no matter where you are.
Cerebral Bore fucked around with this message at 22:56 on Feb 16, 2017 |
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Feb 16, 2017 22:39
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Shady Amish Terror posted:You could maybe try to handwave it as the difference between durable constructions with rituals that you get to keep around and 'hey let's just animate whatever poo poo's laying around from centuries of ascendance wars oh look it fell apart after about twenty minutes, whoops', but I agree that for as much as the game loves its big goofy mythology, it's a curious inconsistency. Dominions doesn't make too many concessions to gameplay or user-friendliness, but I guess that's just one of them.
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Feb 16, 2017 22:40
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Cerebral Bore posted:On the other hand, the fact that the world of Dominions goes through an apocalyptic god war on a semi-regular basis should mean that there are plenty of bones to reanimate no matter where you are. But zombies too? Well, at least this explains why they fall apart after each battle, they're probably just half-assed corpse constructs assembled from whatever was accidentally lying around on the battlefield. 
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Feb 16, 2017 22:48
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Less interested in the bodies than I am the fact that they come up armed and armored. Imagine being a farmer in the world - Every 3 feet you have to stop because your plow turned up another sword. And then you have to bury that sword deeper so the wizards can have it when they raise the undead to kill your family.
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Feb 16, 2017 22:51
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That's why you get fewer resources in farm provinces, they keep burying natures natural sword crop in favour of their wheat.
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Feb 16, 2017 23:13
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They've literally turned the swords to plowshares.
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Feb 17, 2017 01:50
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Leperflesh posted:They've literally turned the swords to plowshares. For which their masters certainly condemn them.
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Feb 17, 2017 05:53
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I ride bikes all day posted:For which their masters certainly condemn them. Nah, let them be peaceful and productive and pure of heart. Their daughters make the best blood slaves.
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Feb 17, 2017 11:52
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Turn 60 Turn 60 begins with Caelum claiming the Throne of the Moon. This Throne had previously been owned by Mictlan, if I recall correctly. We summon wolves, a new Lord (Tiras), and our final Arch-Devil!  This guy is neat because he can spend his turns “summoning allies” and get one free Devil each month. He’ll probably do that forever. Our remote site-searching finds two sites in the underwater province of White Water, and now we have an additional +1A +1N. Man’s Golem moves again, but this time he meets his end!  Unsurprising, considering it was geared out for siege power (??!) Ouch, and it wasn’t even a blood hunting province full of wolves! What happened?   LOL Oh boy, Man’s 115 gem Golem met its end at the hands of Ichtyid province defense. I’m not exactly sure why, but those goofy looking fuckers managed to be brave and chip away at a powerful Golem until it was turned into rock dust. What a wonderful Dominions moment.  Hello Darkness My Old friend...  We see a scouted battle report in which Caelum kicks the AI Jomon army of Shark Warriors out of the province of Jomon…again. I wonder how many times this is going to happen? One of our scouts on Caelum’s coast lets us see that he’s building hundreds and hundreds of lovely Pale One soldiers, which are amphibious. I guess he’s going to invade the ocean with them? I hope he has more of a plan than “build Pale Ones, win ocean” because Shark Warriors are going to rip them to shreds.  This is Not A Good Idea! Pangaea also storms a Ragha fort:  Pan loses a ton of minotaur, but they are losses he can easily afford. This happened to be a Throne province, so Pan just won himself the Throne of the Sun. The Eyes of God let us see another goody he picked up as well:  Pangaea's new Throne, though he still must Claim it.   Discount Site Alert!! Yeah, I’d -love- to have that Construction bonus site. Mages with Hammers + a Construction bonus site can pump out poo poo-loads of cheap gear with which you can then equip thugs. If Pan wants to, he can now begin to build armies of thugs. Our province of Ironwood forest got attacked by Vine Men via a special event. I am not sure if this is a product of the Enchanted Forests global or not. I am pretty sure that if it were from Enchanted Forests the attack would show up as from Man, not independents, so I believe it was just poor luck.  That sounds unpleasant! The massive stack of crossbows, Levites, and Gibborim that we moved from Camia to Villia did its job and cracked the gate overnight. We will be storming Villia with our Vampire squad next turn. We are slowly tearing down Man’s temples and erecting our own, so I hope to see some of our Dominion on the provinces of Man and Solam next turn. We need to keep this momentum going.  Fort-to-Fort fighting. Slow going, but fraught with danger. And here is why: let’s look at some of the score graphs again. It’s been a while since we last checked. First we will look at Provinces:  We are moving up into a solid 3rd place in Provinces. This is why it is so important to keep up momentum against Man, we really need to grab as many of his provinces as possible if we want to become big enough to really contest Bogarus and Pan. Next is Gem Income:  We are still up in 2nd place for Gem Income, but Pan has been seriously aggressively site-searching the past 4 or 5 turns and it is paying off in spades for him. He’s now starting to collect the gem income befitting his massive size as an empire, and I would not be surprised to see him overtake us soon. In 4 turns that will hopefully be moot, because we will cast Arcane Nexus and turn our enemies’ gem income against them. The final graph we’ll look at is Dominion:  We are now the second strongest Dominion in the game, we have overtaken Bogarus. I think this bodes very well, especially since the first strongest is Pan. As long as Pan doesn’t feel threatened by our Dominion I think we are free to push it as hard as we like against Bogarus and Man. Caelum’s player seems to have…forgotten about Dominion. His Dominion is being slowly wrecked by our blood sacrificing, and he’s yet to mention it to me. If he does, and tries to war with us to stop it, I think at this point we could probably take him on well enough. The other score graphs aren’t as important at this point in the game so I’m not bothering with them. Research remains the same, but we’ll accomplish our Research goal in 3 turns regardless. Forts and Army Size are kind of immaterial at this point. Next turn: We'll storm Villia, and we plan the next advancement against Man.
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Feb 19, 2017 01:01
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Yeah, that lovely Vine Men event has nothing to do with Enchanted Forests. It's just a relatively rare bad event that can occur in forest provinces with positive Growth scales. Probably the shittiest part of it is the 10% popkill attached to it, as it's still going to really hurt the province even if the PD resists the attack.
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Feb 19, 2017 06:43
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So ultimately, what did those two Golem thugs accomplish? Disrupting blood hunting in one province and forcing you to spend a turn reconquering one other province?
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Feb 19, 2017 08:12
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My bird panic meter is still in the red.
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Feb 19, 2017 09:30
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I'm betting Man had the Golems kitted out as siege units, but when it rapidly became apparent that he wasn't gonna be sieging poo poo, he said "gently caress it" and sent them out as (ineffectual) raiders rather than letting them sit around collecting dust. An incredibly profligate waste, if so, but if they were already a sunk cost I guess he could have figured that the distraction might be worthwhile.
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Feb 19, 2017 09:32
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Not entirely sure, but if those fishmen are the unit I'm thinking of, they all have nets, so maybe the golem just got a really bad roll of the dice and got caught and poked to death by fishsticks.
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Feb 19, 2017 18:59
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I think that would be a really bad roll of the dice. Nets are poo poo against big things and poo poo against strong things.
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Feb 19, 2017 19:05
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That's a lotta nets.
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Feb 19, 2017 19:06
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Knowing Libluini from the EVE thread, I'd put roughly even odds on him getting incidentally domkilled without noticing.
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Feb 19, 2017 19:13
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Voyager I posted:Knowing Libluini from the EVE thread, I'd put roughly even odds on him getting incidentally domkilled without noticing. Let's see what happens. Caelum Time Caelum Turn 60 Highlights: -Moving Pale Ones pointlessly around -Reinforcing them with Shamblers -"This time it will work because I'll attack the ocean from a different angle!" At this point I was kind of frustrated with AI Jomon still surviving in the ocean, but hadn't yet learned that lovely indep units, even with magical back-up, can't beat Jomons actually rather great underwater units. Ironically, in a normal game I wouldn't have had as much problems, because my water mages summoning water elementals wouldn't be imprisoned behind a goddamn massive wall of poo poo units. Remember, kids: Sometimes less is more! Klick here to jump to older turns. Libluini fucked around with this message at 00:43 on Feb 23, 2017 |
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Feb 19, 2017 20:10
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goatface posted:I think that would be a really bad roll of the dice. Nets are poo poo against big things and poo poo against strong things. Doesn't it still take an action to break them regardless of size?
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Feb 19, 2017 21:46
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The Dangerous thing about nets is that while a unit is trapped inside its Defense score drops to zero so attacks against it are super dangerous. These hilariously bad thug Golems already had a Defense score of like, 7 IIRC, which is truly awful. Net's or not, they were both brought down by lovely PD. Ichthyids are just goofy looking and add insult to injury.
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Feb 19, 2017 21:53
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Have you been sharing the score graphs with anyone else to try and get them to attack Bogarus? Is there even still much politicking going on at this point in the game?
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Feb 22, 2017 05:05
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Mr. Peepers posted:Have you been sharing the score graphs with anyone else to try and get them to attack Bogarus? Is there even still much politicking going on at this point in the game? Oh yeah, we've started to share select information with Pangaea and Caelum, letting them know that Bogarus is a massive threat. We haven't won the war with Man, but at this point it feels like the momentum is definitely in our favor, so I'm looking ahead and cultivating the seeds of an anti-Bogarus alliance. Pangaea is still the biggest nation in the game, but judging by the battle tactics we've seen him deploy for pretty much the entire game (swarm with troops, little-to-no magic support) I feel a lot more confident that we could take him on ourselves after Bogarus is dead. Apologies for the sporadic updates. Turns are longer and more complicated at this point in the game so I am hugely glad that I wrote them ahead of time. I'll get an update up this afternoon or evening!
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Feb 22, 2017 10:39
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No drama about the timing, as all of us are following with rapt attention and we're definitely not hanging out on the next turn...
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Feb 22, 2017 12:37
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Caelum News Network Presents Yes, I finally got around to upload my next turn, which is coincidentally the last turn How Are U posted about. (Edit: Or not, ha ha )Caelum Turn In this turn, AI Mictlan proves to be quite stroppy and stops my half-assed attempt at throwing them from the fort they're sieging. But it's not bad for two reasons: a) They lose almost as much chaff as I do and I am larger and have more money to replace those losses. b) We nearly won even though I had only a single magical priest as magic support. With real mages, Mictlan is toast. Also, they're sieging their own fort which I had just taken from them, so it's not like they're doing more than slowing down my advance. The Pale One Death March continues, with me contemplating forging choices. One idea is using water boosters and breathing rings to upgrade some of my air/water mages with underwater + water elemental summoning capabilities. In a couple turns we'll see how this works out. The rest is me spending 30 minutes talking, talking and talking. There are also a lot of red arrows everywhere, I assume from the shitload of troops I'm marching towards Mictlan. Relations with both Bogarus and Gath remain peaceful, while Pangaea seems to plan something evil, but is apparently waffling as much as I did during the Xibalba-war. (From How Are U I was always hearing about Pangaea first planning to attack me, then suddenly reconsidering. First it was attacking me and changing to attack Xibalba instead, then it changed to attacking me again, until How Are U started building this Anti-Bogarus alliance, at which point Pangaea changed tracks yet again. At least this is what my notes from this time say.) At this point Pangaea is mostly contained behind a fortified choke point and from what I've seen of Pangaean battle tactics, breaking through that point would be an awful nightmare for them, so I'm not really concerned. They can do whatever they want, I'm prepared. Gath is my best ally right now, mostly because his borders are disturbingly close to my capital, which would make war with him an awful nightmare for me. The relation between Bogarus and Caelum at this point is like between Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin: Mictlan is basically Fantasy Poland in this analogy. But I'm smarter than Stalin was and know that Fantasy Hitler will soon be an enormous threat. Especially since after Mictlan is gone, Caelum will stretch across most of the map from north to south, and that entire line in the west will be bordered by Bogarus. In comparison, huge mountain ranges block off most of Gath in the north and Pangaea in the east. Mictlan on the other hand, is directly to the south of my western mountain range, which means whoever wins here can just march straight through enemy territory without getting slowed down by mountains blocking the way. Edit: This could have been embarrassing if How Are U hadn't decided to post his turn 61 just a couple hours after me. Because I didn't notice I was missing the actual turn 59, the last two posts had the videos numbered wrongly. In hindsight I really wish I hadn't cut out so many turns, but oh well. Too late now. The errors in this and the last update are now corrected. Last turn here Libluini fucked around with this message at 00:48 on Feb 23, 2017 |
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Feb 22, 2017 15:15
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Libluini posted:
The threat of messy, mutually assured destruction and chaos in your heartland makes for Good and True friendship! 
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Feb 22, 2017 23:56
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Turn 61 Turn 61 is kind of a quiet one. The turn begins with the usual: wolves, Vamp Lords (Ashkenaz, Riphath), Scapegoats. We sent an Arch Devil to Knobville and he cast Dome of Flaming Death. There are a variety of ‘Dome’ spells and they all put an enchantment on a specific province that protects it from remote-attack spells. Dome of Flaming Death causes the caster of a remote attack to himself be struck by fire. I doubt Man will try throwing fire bolts at my army again because I’m sure he realized what a waste of gems it is, but if he does maybe we’ll kill a wizard or two.  We caught a bunch of blood slaves and we’re summoning two more Vampire Lords. We are also moving a couple of of hunting groups out of their population-depleted provinces and towards more fertile ground. Our cave province of Stalagmia in particular has become very unproductive, averaging around 10-15 slaves for the past few turns. That’s just a waste of 5 blood hunters time. In terms of battles we see Pan attack a Ragha province, and in turn Ragha attacks a Pan province from the sea:  Two dozen naked mermen with poison tipped spears against like 40 berserk minotaurs, what a clever move on AI Ragha’s part. We captured the fortress in Villia!  Vampires make short work of the meager defenses. Now we face three Mannish forts filled to the brim with hundreds of knights and longbows. We picked up 4 candles of Dominion in Solam this turn so we are moving the Vampire squad to attack there. We are also moving the huge army that was sitting in Bahguloth onto Man’s adjacent province of Thorn Woods. There’s no sign of a Troll King there so hopefully we can start sieging the fort without being hit by an Earthquake. We get to see Man’s Enchanted Forest global in action this turn.  Those are some loving packed forts, bro. One of Caelum’s forest provinces gets attacked by Vine Men and Dryads:  This is the kind of poo poo that rises up to attack your provinces courtesy of Enchanted Forests. Now Man owns a little forest in the middle of Caelan territory, for what little good that will do him. Our Dominion is so strong that we haven’t had to deal with it! We are -so- close to hitting Enchantment 9 next turn, but we are just a couple hundred research points shy. That’s fine, at this point casting the spell a turn or two early wouldn’t make a difference. Plus, I’m happy to save up more Pearls with which to pump up the strength of the global. We’ll probably end up liquidating a lot of our gem supplies to cast it as strong as possible. Next turn: putting new Mannish forts to siege!
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Feb 23, 2017 00:18
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Wow, I thought Enchanted Forests would just put out minor harassing swarms, but goddamn, that's a pretty nasty group. Definitely enough to overwhelm most PD and often probably more than that. You're not suffering much from it because you have a pretty powerful dominion backed up by blood sacrificing, but I wonder whether it's giving Pan a headache.
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Feb 23, 2017 05:47
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PurpleXVI posted:Wow, I thought Enchanted Forests would just put out minor harassing swarms, but goddamn, that's a pretty nasty group. Definitely enough to overwhelm most PD and often probably more than that. Pan gets cheap temples, so if they are it's their own drat fault. In a mo money game anyone should have carpeted their provinces with temples by this point, let alone a nation with discounted ones.
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Feb 23, 2017 06:03
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Turn 62 Turn 62 begins with Pangaea claiming the Throne of the Elements, which he stole from Man. The same old spells get cast: wolves, Lords (Togarmah & Elishah), and goats. We capture a bunch of blood slaves but we’re still moving a couple of hunting groups around to new provinces, so our output isn’t great. We are also developing brand new hunting provinces, per usual. There were a couple of interesting battles this turn. We’ll start with our own. We attacked the two Mannish provinces of Solam and Thorn Woods:  Whiffing against nothing but PD in Thorn Woods.  Cowardly Troll Kings flee the field. Both battles were basically against PD, but in Solam Man had his two Earthquake casting Troll Kings waiting in the rear. Vampires all fly, however, and give no fucks, so the Troll Kings merely managed to kill a bunch of their own screening chaff. They did manage to escape the field while the vampires were busy draining the life out of longbows, which is a real shame. Now we’ll have to deal with them in the future and they might be used more judiciously. Pangaea fought a few battles as well. First he stormed Man’s fort in the province of Patala:   That is a Pangaea army over 1000 strong, big even for a Mo Money game. Man’s Magisters rain down thunder and lightning upon them:  This is why gate choke-points are wonderful.  There is little more satisfying than a Thunder Strike pounding massed troops. But it isn’t nearly enough and Pan eventually pushes through for the win. Pan pays a heavy price for it:  It’s a price Pan can afford to pay. Yes, that’s over 700 Hoburg crossbows in that army.  These can very rarely be found as recruitable independents. Pound-for-pound they are one of the best ranged units in the game, and, if found, will be exploited mercilessly. Pan also fights a couple of battles against AI Ragha, one of which included Ragha’s Turan War Elephants which are neat looking and manage to trample some Minotaurs before they’re all slain:  From the forests of Man to the deserts of Ragha, the beast-men horde moves only forward. The last battle of note for the turn involved Bogarus. Bogarus finally took that Monolith + Watchers Throne that was on our border! This time he brought mages:  An Astrapelagist communion. A very dangerous, if inflexible, thing. The Astrapelagist is one of the many types of mages that make Bogarus scary. You can see he has 2A and 1S, making them the perfect mage to spam to form Thunder Strike communions. That is exactly what they do in this battle:    The Watchers have a boat load of HP, huge protection, but no lightning resistance. Thunder Strike blasts them to pieces. They still get some shots off at Bogarus’ charging cavalry, but the battle is very one-sided:  Cavalry dies, but who cares? I was planning to take that Throne!! Even in the next couple turns we could have started to throw Vampires at it until it fell, because it is sitting in our Dominion. Ugh, well we are just going to have to take it first-thing as soon as we go to war with Bogarus. Now we really need to rush for Man’s last Throne, we can’t end this war gaining nothing but provinces! The army in Thorn Woods is going to sit and start to siege the fort down. It is filled with longbows and knights, so it may take a few turns. All of our Vampires that attacked Solam are going to retreat, because loving -somehow- Solam swung from 4 of our candles last turn to only 1 this turn. We will not risk Vampires outside of our Dominion. The big army in Knobville is moving to Solam to take over the siege.  We are also just a couple hundred research points away from Enchantment 9. We’ll have it next turn, and the turn after that we may cast Arcane Nexus. We are also empowering one of our Vampire Lords with Earth magic in order to cast a particular battlefield spell that’s available at Enchantment 9. I’ve never used it before, but heard that it is great. We continue to blood sac hard against Man. We need Dominion! The race is on!
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Feb 24, 2017 21:29
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Is there any way to positively affect province pop growth aside from random events, positive growth scales and time? Any spells or items that generate more peasants/accelerate pop growth?
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Feb 24, 2017 21:56
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PurpleXVI posted:Is there any way to positively affect province pop growth aside from random events, positive growth scales and time? Any spells or items that generate more peasants/accelerate pop growth? No spells (other than a couple that add +Growth scales) and no items. I know there's a mod that our own forums poster Jbrereton made floating around that uses events to repopulate provinces, but I've never tried it.
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Feb 24, 2017 22:09
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Where did Pan dig up Dust Walkers? Buried in Sand?
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Feb 25, 2017 01:43
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Ramc posted:Where did Pan dig up Dust Walkers? Buried in Sand? Had to have been that. I recall speaking with Pan's player on IRC around this time (I try to keep up at least some level of consistent communication with nominal allies) and he was telling me about the massive amount of gems he'd started to pull in since he began site searching in earnest. Our Eyes of God score graphs back that up, so Pangaea definitely has the scratch to burn on big, expensive spells like Hidden in Sand. IIRC he also mentioned something about having so many Death and Fire gems he'd started empowering Pans. e: Hidden in Sand is a high level Enchantment ritual spell. It's a fine way to spend extra Earth gems, and to break into perhaps otherwise unavailable path combos. You also get some very strong, very tough undead troops out of it.   Maybe from an event? VVVV How are u fucked around with this message at 01:56 on Feb 25, 2017 |
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Feb 25, 2017 01:46
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Do they come from anywhere else?
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Feb 25, 2017 01:46
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Hoburg Crossbows are the best and I am producing the cap (100) a turn and ferrying them to the front lines as fast as their stubby MM1 legs will go.How are u posted:IIRC he also mentioned something about having so many Death and Fire gems he'd started empowering Pans. Yep! I think I also have the Kings of Fire at this point, from empowered Pans and a one in a million seduction of a Ragha Fire Spirit. Also, Re: Enchanted Forests. That was probably on my border with Bogarus where my dom was not completely saturated. Pretty much every province at this point has a temple and 10+ dryads preaching, since there are mutliple blood jerks in this game.
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Feb 25, 2017 02:07
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AfroSquirrel posted:Hoburg Crossbows are the best and I am producing the cap (100) a turn and ferrying them to the front lines as fast as their stubby MM1 legs will go. What is it about them that makes them so good? Just that they're cheap crossbowmen?
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Feb 25, 2017 07:07
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Caros posted:What is it about them that makes them so good? Just that they're cheap crossbowmen? That and they're so small you can get them in a tighter formation so more of them are near the target.
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Feb 25, 2017 07:21
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Incredibly cheap, small size so more can be fit in a single area, and also have better than average precision - which means they hit their target more than most crossbows (human ones generally have 10). They're pretty good.
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Feb 25, 2017 07:41
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AfroSquirrel posted:Hoburg Crossbows are the best and I am producing the cap (100) a turn and ferrying them to the front lines as fast as their stubby MM1 legs will go. Doesn't pan have blood sacrificing as well?
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Feb 25, 2017 10:36
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