Mo Money, Mo Problems - Let's Play Dominions 4!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Mo Money, Mo Problems - Let's Play Dominions 4!

IthilionTheBrave: Sep 5, 2013

Cythereal posted:

Dominions is a game I love to read about but think I'd hate to actually play. Watching with interest.

Sorta this, but substitute "think I'd hate to actually play" with "I just don't care for the diplomacy/social aspect, personally." Which is a shame, because I normally love smashing pixel mans against each other. Most of the time, at least.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2016 05:43

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# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 08:25

IthilionTheBrave: Sep 5, 2013

Shady Amish Terror posted:

A Good and Cool thing to point out, yeah.

Another useful application of Construction tech is actually in Research boosting items. If you're making use of big piles of middling power researchers or unimportant magicians for your magical research, one way to boost the effectiveness of your research program is to forge items like the Owl Quill that give a bonus to research instead of magical paths. Knowing when and how much to do this is just another part of the gigantic, sprawling optimization problem that is Dominions, but I'm going to hazard the guess that it depends HEAVILY on what kind of gems you can afford to spend and whether the cost-benefit is better than just buying up more cheap researchers; if you have access to some kind of cheap sage unit that does research extraordinarily well and nothing else, and you're not relying heavily on gold, it would probably be cheaper to buy more researchers than to buff the existing ones (which also requires the time of at least one mage FORGING those items).

Of note in regards to the cost efficiency of forging boosters, MA Ulm is notable in that regard. Their Master Smiths have a trait that reduces forging costs by 2. They all get 2E by default and can, via Earth Boots, easily reach the requirements for forging a dwarven hammer (which reduces forging costs by 2). These 2 stack. Master Smiths can get A1, which is required to create the first research booster (Owl Quills). Combining the forge bonus trait with the dwarven hammer means a Master Smith can crank out an Owl Quill for a mere 1 Air gem. They can produce Lightless Lanterns (another research booster, albeit one that can Horror Mark) for a single fire gem (Master Smiths natively get 2F, I believe). MA Ulm can very easily crank out research boosters super cheap. The only real problem is getting a smith with A1 and using him to find a site that provides the appropriate gem early on so you can start with Owl Quills, as the Lightless Lantern requires Con 6, if I'm not mistaken.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2016 06:44

IthilionTheBrave: Sep 5, 2013

My favorite scripting screwup back when I played was accidentally making my S mages cast Blink, because I assumed it was like the D&D Blink (make mage harder to hit due to illusions/blinking in and out of existence rapidly), rather than the "teleport forward semi-randomly" kind of Blink. It cost me quite a few mages, especially since they were in a communion. So most of my mages ended up teleporting forward closer to enemy lines and I lost a bunch of them to the enemy.

At least I'm pretty sure that's what happened, it's been ages.

Edit: In retrospect, it's not so much a scripting accident as it was being an idiot and not reading the spell descriptions properly before assigning them.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2017 03:35

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