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Turn 13 Turn 13 begins with an announcement that another Throne has been claimed:  A good throne, with positive scales and good income. Anybody would be glad to have it. We have a couple of battle reports for the turn. We get a scouted report of a Man battle where he wipes out some indies in a hail of longbow arrows and crossbow bolts, then we put the villains that ganked our province of Old Man Mountains to the sword, nobody takes territory from the Mighty Men of Gath:  Look at those beautiful, bearded warriors in action  We also clown a bunch of Barbarians in the Forest of Springs, keeping our expansion going for as long as we can!  The final message lets us know that we just got our single actual hero!  You and I will do great things together  Sabba is an awesome hero for us to get. She is Astral 3, which we can technically get on our cap-only slow to recruit Kohen Gadol mage-priests, but it is a very small chance indeed. She is also Nature 4, which is fantastic because otherwise we are hard-capped at Nature 2 on our Abbas. She is going to open up a lot of possibilities in terms of forging items and casting ritual spells [oh is she ever!], I’m super happy to have her. We send her south from the capitol to build a temple in Range of Light, where a castle will soon be completed, and then she will continue to site search and build temples. Speaking of Kohen Gadol, we built our first one this turn! He is taking a fresh batch of Gibborim and Asherite soldiers out from the capitol to take some of the last indie provinces that we hemmed into our territory during expansion. Hemming provinces in is a wise way to expand, because by weaving your expansion around difficult provinces you can deny access to other players, and then come pick them up when you have more resources. There are several of these provinces that we will pick up over the next few turns.  Finally, on the diplomatic front, Man’s player got our IRC message and he doesn’t want to give up the other two territories that I claimed. He didn’t tell us to “gently caress off” though, so I think he still wants peace. He said we could negotiate, so I’m going to back off a little and ask him to choose one of them to cede to me, and then we can establish a NAP. I’m hoping he’ll take the bait. Next turn, I’ll try to talk to Xibalba some more and see how things stand with the bats. I do not feel ready for a war, so I want to prolong peace as much as possible. We have sites to search for, and infrastructure to build! Bonus! Libluini's turn thirteen. How are u fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Oct 4, 2016 |
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Oct 4, 2016 02:02
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Congrats on the hero!
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Oct 4, 2016 05:15
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Man has a hot potato on his hands, diplomatically. "Losing" 2 provinces this early in the game can have some impact, but when a 5 meter tall bully asks you for something is kinda difficult to say no, specially when you're just a non-magical dude with a sword.
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Oct 4, 2016 07:50
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Fat Samurai posted:Man has a hot potato on his hands, diplomatically. "Losing" 2 provinces this early in the game can have some impact, but when a 5 meter tall bully asks you for something is kinda difficult to say no, specially when you're just a non-magical dude with a sword. sure but look at that map, man has two forts and possibly four consecutive farm provs, so not doing poorly. depending on research they might be able to at least annoy giants to ensure they both lose in a confrontation, especially if man can get someone else involved.
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Oct 4, 2016 14:13
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Demanding provinces from Man right now is mainly bluster and posturing. My big scary giants are better than his mans, but I can only build so many of them, and his economy is -much- better than mine because he's not running a single major bless, much less a double major. If he tells me to eat poo poo there isn't anything I can really do about it right now.
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Oct 4, 2016 14:45
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Yeah, demanding stupid poo poo is practically a part of the Dom4-experience at this point. Always make dumb demands all the time.
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Oct 4, 2016 15:14
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Sloppy Milkshake posted:sure but look at that map, man has two forts and possibly four consecutive farm provs, so not doing poorly. depending on research they might be able to at least annoy giants to ensure they both lose in a confrontation, especially if man can get someone else involved. Good point, didn't notice that second fort.
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Oct 4, 2016 15:20
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I hope we see some really strange summons or fringe units that have interesting lore.
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Oct 5, 2016 02:46
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Fat Samurai posted:Good point, didn't notice that second fort. Between the fact that Man has three forts and Gath only making 5 gibbors a turn, Man would probably be able to overwhelm the giants with numbers. It would be a really messy war that neither side would win without outside help. I mean keep in mind that this is a $texas money game, Man's got the resources to throw up a wall of lances and crossbows.
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Oct 5, 2016 05:19
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Turn 14 Turn 14 begins with messages from two of our Yeddeoni who didn’t find any magic sites in the provinces that they searched, what a shame  .We also see a proclamation from Bogarus regarding a new prophet. Nothing special, but it shows that Bogarus lost their prophet while expanding, and is finally able to declare a new one. Then there is a series of battle reports from both our scouts and our own army. First we see that our army conquered Bithane pretty easily, that’s great and helps to consolidate our territory even more.  Those Horn Blowers tend to end up at the front of the line and then get murdered Then there are a series of “pings” that both we and Man made on Throne provinces. A “ping” is when you send a single commander to attack a province or a sieged fort in order to get a completely accurate read on the defenses. First, we’ll look at the ping we made on our closest Throne province:  We see a Sorceress, a metric shitload of barbarians, and a bunch of phantasmal warriors. That’s not bad, we can definitely take this Throne and we will do so in a handful of turns. It is a level 2 Throne, so it probably won’t be amazing or game-changing, but we will take it! Next we see the Throne that Man pinged in Gryphon Rock:   holy poo poo nobody is taking this throne for a LONG time, goddamn. Here are the Throne defenders: The Monolith is a very tough cookie, super high protection, high HP, and great magic paths with which to cast fuckery spells to ruin you:  The Watchers are high HP, high protection statues that throw lightning. Lightning is strong, and will kill armies dead. This Throne is going to be independent for a long time.  Then we see Man’s ping on the Throne in Cacevic Highlands [editor's note: I seem to have never taken a screenshot of the battle report] We have an Annunaki of the Sky and a loving poo poo-load of Spring Hawks, that is not going to be an easy Throne to take. Here’s the Annunaki:  Massive Air magic, he will almost certainly cast Fog Warriors, an incredibly powerful army-wide battlefield spell, and then rain thunder strikes down on anybody who fucks with him. The Spring Hawks are as so:  They’re strong and tough in their own way, but they are kind of a one-dimensional wonder. If you can beat their Ethereal nature (mundane weapons have a 75% chance to not affect them) and make your troops immune to lightning damage (the only damage type they can do) then they are pretty harmless. At this stage in the game, however, they’ll slaughter any army that moves. The messages for the turn end with 3 minor events in our territory, all positive, which net us a total of 10 Nature gems and 383 gold. Excellent, love it! We end the turn by queueing a couple new castles to be built in new territory, and we move more of our armies against hemmed in indie provinces. We will soon be out of expansion territory. We are already boxed in by our neighbors so once we run out of room and build our infrastructure we will need to go to war. Also, good news: We made a longer peace with Xibalba, so Man looks to be our first war. [editor's note: try to count how many times I state that so and so nation will be our first war, then switch to somebody else, before we actually enter our first war!]  Bonus! Libluini's turn fourteen How are u fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Oct 6, 2016 |
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Oct 6, 2016 00:43
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I'm still not relevant yet. I will be later, though!
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Oct 6, 2016 01:14
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Spring hawks are devastating in newbie games.
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Oct 6, 2016 09:33
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And with this turn, my first attempt at pressuring Jomon into war failed and I suddenly found myself with a province less and a nasty unwanted NAP in my hands.
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Oct 6, 2016 10:47
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Nanomashoes posted:Spring hawks are devastating in newbie games. Spring hawks are devastating, period. Newbies just don't know to avoid them. Experienced players just see the province and proceed to ignore it for 50 turns, and then get halfway owned by it anyway. gently caress spring hawks.
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Oct 6, 2016 14:11
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Spring hawks are actually very easy to deal with if you have either 1) lightning resist on your troops or 2) magic weapons on your troops. If you can get both then they're trivial. My Gibborim have magic weapons, and, combined with our double bless, would probably have been able to take that throne in year 2 without too much trouble. Unfortunately for Man he has none of these things. He does make good attempts though!
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Oct 6, 2016 14:30
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ChickenWing posted:Spring hawks are devastating, period. Newbies just don't know to avoid them. Experienced players just see the province and proceed to ignore it for 50 turns, and then get halfway owned by it anyway. I had this weird idea of loading up scouts with that one fire item which makes you explode when you die, and then sending them in to get swarmed with spring hawks. Never got around to testing if this actually works or if the spring hawks just zap them from afar without getting a scratch.
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Oct 6, 2016 14:31
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Libluini posted:I had this weird idea of loading up scouts with that one fire item which makes you explode when you die, and then sending them in to get swarmed with spring hawks. Never got around to testing if this actually works or if the spring hawks just zap them from afar without getting a scratch. 5 gems and one mage turn per item x like 10 items orrrrrrrrrrr get the 25 square shock resistance spell and Do A Magic at them 
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Oct 6, 2016 15:16
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ChickenWing posted:5 gems and one mage turn per item x like 10 items Yeah, now I remember why I never bothered trying this out. (But one day the time of the exploding scout will come!)
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Oct 6, 2016 15:20
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Turn 15 We begin turn 15 with another Throne claim message. This time it is Bogarus claiming the Iron Throne. The Iron Throne gives some resources and allows recruitment of Adepts of the Iron order. That could be useful for some nations, but seeing as Bogarus is basically Magic Diversity: The Nation, it won’t be quite as much of a win for him.   We see that Man and Ulm both proclaim new prophets, so they lost their previous ones somewhere along the way, nothing too interesting there. Next we have two battle reports, three actually but the third wasn’t a battle. First we see our Kohen Gadol led army smashed the indie enclave of Troll Peaks, bringing them effortlessly into the fold.  We also finally took the province of Summerbay. The astute reader may recall that I ceded Summerbay to Xibalba earlier, but such is diplomacy in Dominions that a few turns ago we decided that I will take Summerbay and he’ll take the province just to the south of it. Xibalba's player actually forgot that he was going to take the province, and he didn't seem to care enough to want to correct the mistake. I'm happy, because now we have a rich province, and I begin construction of a Citadel immediately!   We also take the undefended Mannish province of Ironwood Forest. Diplo outside of the game led us to reach an agreement with Man where we get to take Ironwood Forest, he keeps Walnut Woods to the south, and we establish a 1 year NAP. Again, astute readers may be thinking “but how are u, just last turn you said Man was our target!” and you would be right. However, we have a poo poo-load of very expensive castles, labs, and temples to build before we will be ready for a real war. Twelve turns is actually not a very long time in a Mo Money game. In fact, the first Mo Money game got to turn 138 and was probably just beginning to wind down before it crashed to death, so there you go.  The final message of the turn is an event that gave us 12 air gems, found in the shards of a broken mirror. I’ll take em! Lastly, we are going to take our first Throne next turn! Armies around the province of Trencebor will converge on it next month, led by one of our ferocious Kohen Gadol high priests. Mighty Gibborim and fanatical Levite Zealots will smash the barbarians and sorcerers guarding the Throne and we will take its power for ourselves.   Next turn: games involving Thrones! Bonus! Libluini's turn fifteen
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Oct 8, 2016 19:10
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Ah yes, the Turn My Cat Hated. 
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Oct 8, 2016 20:38
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So how aware of your non-neighbours are you at this point? Any players that already look like they might be pulling in too much power?
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Oct 9, 2016 04:47
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Deceitful Penguin posted:So how aware of your non-neighbours are you at this point? Any players that already look like they might be pulling in too much power? At this point in the game I am vaguely aware of other nations than my neighbors. We have scouts starting to snake off into the unknown, and I have probably discovered that Pangaea is just to the South East of Xibalba, and that Patala is Man's neighbor to the West and Xibalba's to the East. I don't have any real idea of what things look like in the far Southern portion of the map where I assume Mictlan, Ragha, and Ulm are all located. Regarding power, well, we don't know much! In Dominions 4 the default settings have Score Graphs turned Off. When you pull up the Score Graphs you only see the information for your own nation. You can gain the ability to look at other nations' score graphs by various means, most commonly by infiltrating a nation's capitol with a Spy type unit. There is also the spell The Eyes of God which reveals all of the score graphs for everybody for the person who casts it. But yeah, at this point, with expansion ending, I am feeling like we've done an OK job, and aren't substantially smaller than any of our neighbors.
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Oct 9, 2016 21:29
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Hey, cool, another Dom LP. I should get back in the game one of these days. Is LA Ulm still stupid overpowered? You're not going to want to let him snowball.
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Oct 10, 2016 00:52
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sullat posted:Hey, cool, another Dom LP. I should get back in the game one of these days. Is LA Ulm still stupid overpowered? You're not going to want to let him snowball. LA Ulm is still definitely very powerful if you let them live past year 1. We'll learn more about Ulm in the future...!
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Oct 10, 2016 01:08
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I sure wish I did, but that's for the future to tell.
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Oct 10, 2016 01:19
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Can't wait to see how someone takes out that ridiculous statue army.
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Oct 10, 2016 07:33
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Turn 16 We begin turn 16 with a message indicating that we have completed a level of Thaumaturgy research. I switched our research out of Alteration and into Thaumaturgy a little while back when it became clear that we were not going to get into an early war. Thaumaturgy 3 and 4 have four site-searching remote spells that I want. In many games people don’t bother with those spells, I tend to like them, and because the site frequency in this game is set to 75% it will be worth searching every province we own very thoroughly. Next we see that Ulm claimed the Throne of Life:  3 nature gems and +1 to growth scales, a really great Throne to have. I’m jealous, especially considering what we will see in a moment. We see that two of our mages found magic sites when they searched for them last turn!   2 astral pearls and 1 nature gem, nothing game-changing but I’m happy to have them! We see that Man crushed another group of indies, boring, but then there’s the report from our Throne battle!  I do not understand why I didn't take more screens of the battlefield in these early turns. I very much rectify this later on. We annihilated the Throne guardians, not even a contest. So, what is our amazing Throne prize??  The Throne of Misfortune?!  Terrible! Yes, when claimed, the Throne of Misfortune gives a very generous 4 pearls a turn, but it comes at the cost of +1 misfortune scale. I am so loathe to do that to my nation! Ugh, I may wait a little bit before claiming this throne, what a drat shame. We start construction of a Citadel, Temple, and Lab on the province as well as search it with the mages already there. Mages from other labs are sent on a trek across the country to Trencebor so they can search as well. Throne provinces are auto-tagged with the “manysites” tag, which means that there could be a poo poo-load of sites hiding there. Maybe we’ll get luckier with a great hidden site There’s a battle report for a Bogarus battle against some indies, unimportant except for the fact that his Pretender God took part, so we get a peek at that.   Kind of lackluster, Bogarus must have taken it as an awake expander, it is useless for anything else. The final three messages are an event that gave us a couple fire gems and astral pearls, an announcement that because the Throne of Life has been claimed units across the world have gotten younger, and a report that our patrolling troops in Summerbay took care of the unrest in the province. Next turn: Somebody is dumb enough to try to take one of those level 3 Thrones  Bonus! Libluini's turn sixteen
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Oct 11, 2016 21:37
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Errr, Libluini's video is Part 16, not Turn 16 - while each covers a single turn, Libluini skipped the first few turns. This video is for Early Winter of Year 2, as opposed to the middle of Summer here. Also, you apparently decide to claim the Throne in a few turns after all. You can see how closely I'm following the videos, since I just noticed.
Lord Koth fucked around with this message at 00:26 on Oct 12, 2016 |
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Oct 12, 2016 00:22
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Cool news. Anything else going on in the future in this game that you'd like to spoil?
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Oct 12, 2016 00:31
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How valuable are 4 pearls a turn? Obviously not valuable enough to make this Throne a must have but not negligible enough to just ignore.
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Oct 12, 2016 01:02
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Disclaimer: I've never been able to wrap my head far enough around Dominions to actually play the game, not with the time investment competing with things like 'work' and 'trying to be a functional person', but I loved Dom 3 enough in concept that I unwisely tried to learn the game anyways. Unless Dom4 has made a major change to the dynamics of gem values, four pearls a turn is pretty sweet for a single province. Pearls are in some ways one of the most valuable gems; astral magic has some of the biggest, hardest-hitting abilities in the game which can't be fully replicated by any other school of magic, and I'd assume pearls can still be turned into all other gems at a rate of two for one, making a stockpile of astral gems a useful strategic reserve even for a nation that can't natively make much use of them. They're involved in the creation of some pretty sweet gear as well. Shifting your scales towards Misfortune is bad (potentially really, really bad), but unless you already have Misfortune 1 or 2 scales it's unlikely to be game-breaking. Some very, VERY nasty effects are unlocked the more misfortune you have, like losing every single magic gem stored in your labs(!), getting massive independent invasions of your provinces, or just generally being miserable and losing random resources every turn. If I understand the general math well enough though, when you have Luck scales, it's just a trade-off between reliable income (and four pearls a turn isn't bad), and the amount of good luck your scales bring. The effects of misfortune and luck events seem to diminish somewhat with empire size, since getting a handful of free gems or gaining or losing a random lab doesn't matter as much when your empire's huge, so reliable income is probably the safer bet in the long run. An important element of strategy many good players have always repeated is to site-search early and site-search often, because a small amount of reliable gem income per turn adds up very quickly, and every turn a site isn't giving you gems is a turn you're not getting the full use of your strategic resources. A good early source of pearls could add up to hundreds in the long run, and on average probably won't make or break the difference in Luck scales...as long as you don't already HAVE at least Misfortune 1, in which case you're exposing yourself to some pretty annoying possible events. AGAIN, this advice should be taken with a generous heaping of salt, probably enough to build a small Pretender with. E: Oh, and I quirk I forgot! Unless Dom 4 has changed things, you're limited to a maximum number of random events per turn (four, I think?), so by the time your empire is large enough to start brushing up against that limit, you're going to want to be investing in resources other than Luck. Luck can grant massive game-winning boons in the first year (and Misfortune can tank you in the same), but in the long run they become less important due in part to the hard cap on events. E2: Some forums digging suggests that it's a soft cap of 4, and some events ignore the 'cap', but due to diminishing returns you'd still be better off turning Luck into per-turn resources after just a few turns of game time if expansion's going well. Shady Amish Terror fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Oct 12, 2016 |
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Oct 12, 2016 01:27
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Among Dominions players, you basically have two groups. Those willing to take some Misfortune for the extra points, and those who never take even a single level in Misfortune, EVER - generally because they got horribly screwed by it in some early game. Ultimately it's a gamble, as you're potentially risking a single extremely rare horrible event, or a string of moderately bad events all at once, in exchange for more tangible and always reliable boosts to something or another. Note that the specific event which removes every single gem you have also requires heavy Drain scales, which is one reason you don't take heavy levels in both as anyone - most relevant for MA Ulm or the few other nations that can take Drain scales due to Drain-immune researchers, as most other nations generally don't want to take Drain anyways as it slows down their research. As for the gems, in a game with normal sites 4 pearls off a single throne is actually a pretty big deal, typically worth taking the single point hit to your scales to grab as soon as possible. Here, with far higher site frequency, it's not quite as valuable, though still pretty significant.
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Oct 12, 2016 01:40
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Misfortune acceptance, like Drain, relies heavily on you nation and build. In general misfortune is very bad unless you are set up to play around with it.
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Oct 12, 2016 01:54
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Mis 2 is free scales unless you've got drain, death, growth, bad pd, or are just unlucky.
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Oct 12, 2016 01:59
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Lord Koth posted:Errr, Libluini's video is Part 16, not Turn 16 - while each covers a single turn, Libluini skipped the first few turns. This video is for Early Winter of Year 2, as opposed to the middle of Summer here. Also, you apparently decide to claim the Throne in a few turns after all. You can see how closely I'm following the videos, since I just noticed. Oh, well crud. I'll admit I don't watch them through before posting an update, so if somebody would like to figure out what Libluini video synchs to my current update that would be cool. Or, I can just let Libluini post a link to the correct video in the timeline for each update. I'll just stop linking them until then!
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Oct 12, 2016 01:59
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Ah, yeah, I'd forgotten about how a lot of the weird events require multiple scales to be at certain levels, my bad. Point stands in general that Misfortune 1 or 2 is usually not all that threatening except in the early game. Four pearls per turn IS pretty boss. I also failed to mention how the site density would affect the mental calculus as well, though I was at least vaguely aware of it; if this were a game with extremely low site odds, four pearls per turn would be an amazing coup, and the main reason it's not an automatic immediate 'yes please' in this game is partially because it makes less of a difference when there's magic sites everywhere. Am I wrong, however, in assuming that the throne merely shifts your scales one point towards misfortune? Given this nation has luck 2 to begin with it should be a very safe choice to just take the pearls. Boring, perhaps, but safe. uPen posted:Mis 2 is free scales unless you've got drain, death, growth, bad pd, or are just unlucky. I do love that both death and growth feed into terrible misfortune events. Growth is mostly utterly massive vine men invasions, if memory serves; death I'm unsure of. Massive plagues, skeleman uprisings, something like that?
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Oct 12, 2016 02:22
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Shady Amish Terror posted:Ah, yeah, I'd forgotten about how a lot of the weird events require multiple scales to be at certain levels, my bad. Point stands in general that Misfortune 1 or 2 is usually not all that threatening except in the early game. Four pearls per turn IS pretty boss. I also failed to mention how the site density would affect the mental calculus as well, though I was at least vaguely aware of it; if this were a game with extremely low site odds, four pearls per turn would be an amazing coup, and the main reason it's not an automatic immediate 'yes please' in this game is partially because it makes less of a difference when there's magic sites everywhere. 1) Yeah, its just +1 Misfortune scale, which would move our current Luck 2 --> Luck 1. Still, I hate Misfortune! We've already seen indies invade us a couple of times, costing us 1000g worth of constructing a Castle. 2) Actually, I have been told many times that some of the very best events come from having low level Death scales. Princes and Noblemen drop dead fairly often and leave you their fortunes of 1000s of gold and random magic items.
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Oct 12, 2016 02:45
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Misfortune 2 every game baby.
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Oct 12, 2016 05:01
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Honestly Disorder 3 Luck 3 is way more fun for events.
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Oct 12, 2016 05:25
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Also fun thing to notice for people who might be less familiar with the game, Misfortune can go up to 3 just like any other national scale, but you'll notice very few people advocating in favor of taking it. There are some gonzo strategies that rely on having the worst scales possible (unless Dom 4 has significantly nuked them from the previous game), but Misfortune 3 is a lot of heartache for relatively little additional benefit otherwise. The bright side is that if you take terrible scales and are really good at spreading dominion, you can make a significant chunk of the world miserable for however many turns it takes for all your neighbors to agree to NAP's with each other in order to stamp you out. I'm also willing to assume that very little has changed from Dom 3 and if you DO decide to try to do this, people will catch on very quickly and will be very, very sour at you for it. Plus, you have to deal with your OWN terrible dominion the whole time. The primary advantage of building around Misfortune is usually that it gives you build points you can put into taking better scales which in turn will minimize the impact of Misfortune. Order directly counters the effects of Misfortune some by reducing the number of random events that happen. Having positive scales elsewhere (with the exception of Growth) helps you by not making you eligible for the really terrible events. If memory serves, there's also some fairly nice random events that require a combination of high Luck and high Order, which is not really a build many nations are going to favor, since Luck's effects are suppressed some by Order and it's very expensive to max both when you could just go full Turmoil instead to maximize the benefits of your Luck scale. Also, again, the events cap and the limits of the events themselves mean they matter less and less the longer a game goes on, good or bad. Unless you took Misfortune 3 and anything else, pretty much.
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Oct 12, 2016 08:19
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