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There are a lot of spells that aren't technically useful to cast, but oh so satisfying.
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Jan 23, 2020 14:11
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 20:41 |
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How does soul slay targeting work? Whoever has the biggest hp to murder? I'm impressed that U lost 3 immortals to it, but if that's how targeting works it makes sense.
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Jan 23, 2020 15:44
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Donkringel posted:How does soul slay targeting work? Whoever has the biggest hp to murder? I'm impressed that U lost 3 immortals to it, but if that's how targeting works it makes sense. Basically, yeah. IIRC Dominions is a little goofy and will look at whoever has the most HP in their square even for single-target spells but in practice this usually doesn't change much since high HP targets tend to be big targets.
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Jan 23, 2020 15:47
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Straight White Shark posted:Basically, yeah. IIRC Dominions is a little goofy and will look at whoever has the most HP in their square even for single-target spells but in practice this usually doesn't change much since high HP targets tend to be big targets. I think it prioritizes lower MR over higher MR too but the HP thing seems to be the king targetting determiner. The AI absolutely wants to hurt the biggest hp blobs on the field.
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Jan 24, 2020 14:32
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Turn 25 Before anything else happens, we get our first throne! 3 water gems is more than our site searching has uncovered so far and the defence skill is going to be vital during hand-to-claw combat with mantises. Hydromancers don't matter too much to us because water 3 doesn't give you a massive amount over our existing water 2 but we'll probably get a couple.  Pongy also does his drat job for once and finds us some more precious air gems.  Eesh this is not what I wanted to see. Mantises are highly mobile and it's going to be extremely annoying to try and catch flying raiders.  First off in the west the mantises chose to try and sweep up all my lands near Karanaac. Makes sense, since I can't reinforce that side nearly as easily. The lovely small mantises from the candle sweep through a small amount of PD easily enough.  Some bigger mantises come in from their lands even further west and jump on Karanaac itself. Because I had clowns building infrastructure last turn I decided not to patrol but I'm confident enough to break siege on this force.  Over in my lands the pretender somehow flew over four provinces to arrive in some undefended lands. She does not gently caress around and is an absolute murder machine in melee however like I said last turn she is definitely vulnerable to evocations with only 40-50 hp.   In particular the spell Arcane Bolt is going to be very effective against mantises because they're all magic beings. It's only astral 2 to cast which most clown mages have and they can all get to with a pearl to cast Power of the Spheres. 10 armour-negating magic damage will kill that pretender in only a few hits but as previously noted with Karanaac's god it can be hard to kill flyers before they just run off.  The real hard part however will be catching her. She can almost certainly get to any province I have on this side of the map, although it'll just be hitting at random unless the mantises have enough scouts in my lands. Seriously this is how far she went in one turn!  One of the smaller mantis thugs tries to do the same thing on the small candle but luckily for me bumps into the forces I put there. Jumping onto an enormous clown is generally not what you want to be doing.  There's two things I'm doing to try and beat raiding. First off I have smallish squads retaking the provinces they've taken from me. Breaking siege in Karanaac and a force moving up north. I feel like it wouldn't actually take that many enormous clown bodyguards (with magic weapons no less) on an evocation spamming mage to be able to kill the pretender.   Next up it's important that I take the fight to them. Running in circles in my own lands playing whack-a-mole is a fool's game and I can't win like that. Accordingly I'm moving a large force into the large candle and then onto the caves.  Not being able to take Fenno's cap is pretty unfortunate but I have one last group of UW indies that I might as well try to take this lake nextdoor with. At this point I don't really care if they win or simply stop costing me upkeep.  As you may have seen I used a Clown Paramount to claim the throne with. These guys are in a bit of an awkward middle ground being cap only and better mages than 1st or 13th clowns, but nowhere near as good or expensive as an Ancient Clown. I don't get too many of them but having 1-2 around to be H3 priests is pretty handy. Claiming thrones, casting Divine Blessing to hit every troop with a blessing, and so on. Most of the time though if I can afford an Ancient Clown I'll get those and otherwise just get a First Clown.   Oh one last thing let's look at how the undead are doing. They've pushed Chasos away from their cap and presumably are going to try and break the siege on their throne. Iram however have most of the cap circles provinces on the other side and must be pressuring the cap themselves. 
gonadic io fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Jan 26, 2020 |
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Jan 26, 2020 17:56
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Jan 26, 2020 19:20
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It reads like the clown paramount should have inspirational leader or something.
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Jan 26, 2020 19:43
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Jan 26, 2020 21:34
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bone shooters are exactly the same as vanilla banebow archers, with a different skin and just D2 to summon instead of D2F1 (because none of your mages get any fire) I probably would have been better off just getting more longdead horsemen instead e: or wait no, banebows are the same as regular longdead banebow archers. bone shooters are a different skeleton archer with regular bows you can get from telling undead announcers to summon allies, in addition to the bone chariots there the bitcoin of weed fucked around with this message at 01:17 on Jan 27, 2020 |
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Jan 27, 2020 00:54
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Also I would like to point out that apparently the jugglers have had enough of the Atlanteans too if you count the kills.
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Jan 27, 2020 10:17
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Turn 26 Karanaac has gone AI! I don't really blame them at this point there wasn't a lot they could do about a hellbless specifically designed (and tested) to counter them. Their best chance would have been to exist as a rump state on the island and underwater even though their cap recruits are by far the best part of the nation. Another turn full of battles with the mantises. We reclaim the all important connection point with all their armies having moved away. This force is going to prevent any more non-flying mantises from going anywhere near my lands.  Our first lizard shaman popped! I've said it before but I'm really excited about these guys. Nature is going to be great to site search with and they make great communion masters with regen, relief, and howl. Pazdegird here has a bright future ahead of him. Note also that their hat is funny enough that they're considered honourary clowns and so get boosted up to a pretty chunky 17 hp.  Wait was that a battle screenshot? Why are in they in a battle?  Sigh, never mind then. I'll get some nature access some day.  We break out of the siege on Karanaac itself and find out that the mantises took the opportunity to reinforce. That's a lot of the big ones, as well as one of the big cap only mages. Because the big ones have magic weapons I haven't scripted any slapstick displays (invulnerability being useless against them). Instead I have a little bit of miming but mostly just evocations like arcane bolt and star fires.  Still though we have a great big blob of clowns so I assume we'll be fine especially with our new defence skill! The lack of much protection from magic is pretty concerning though this is going to get real bloody.  The forces meet in the middle with the mage once again trying to attack rear and flying into a welcoming committee of enormous clown bodyguards.  In just 2-3 rounds it's over. Clowns come out on top but the two central forces annihilated each other. The expensive mantis thug was reduced to just 2 hp but managed to get away. Unfortunately it still managed to sneak through the bodyguards slightly and off a first clown.  We did manage to win but this was a real costly one. I added up gold costs though: we had 3k gold of troops and mages in the fight, and lost about 2k's worth of them. The mantises had 2.5k gold in the fight and lost only 1.3k's worth. Added to the fact that our scales are terrible and the mantis' are presumably incredible and we are simply going to have to start to do better than this. We cannot make many more trades like this.  Next door the mantises jump on top of a Karanaac fort. I hope they're going to storm it next turn instead of moving straight past it onto me.  Our militia's battle went about as expected and good riddance. This was honestly about a thousand gold total I spent on them that could have been another fort or more Ancient Clowns. What a tragedy.  With our reinforcements arriving we go out to meet them so our forces don't get split up and forced to fight apart. The plan is to retake the provinces one-by-one while continuing to recruit from Karanaac's cap. Small clowns being available at any fort is a major factor of why I chose to play this nation and it's certainly paying off here. It's more common in mods games of course but having non-cap sacred troops, and great ones at that, is still a rarity. You can see also in this screenshot that Karanaac just finished another fort by the lake and it got instantly sieged by Sea Dogs. I am confident in saying that AI Karanaac will literally never figure out how to break that siege since rocks have a difficult time doing it in the best of circumstances. Good thing they went AI honestly, I would have been very mad if that happened to me.  Over in our own lands we are mostly just moving around small-ish clown squads to take back the provinces from the raiding pretender. I don't really have any way of knowing where she'll go next so all I can do is pray for a clash with one of my actual armies, I'm sure it'll happen eventually. Fennoscandia is still unsieged even if they have about 2 provinces total I wonder why Anglia is taking so long.  Anglia's force down here still hasn't moved at all. I'm pretty concerned by it honestly so my big clown force here is not moving one jot until the fort is finished no matter how much I would like them to join the bug hunt. It'd be pretty great if said bug tried to jump on the throne but that'd be a foolish move so seems unlikely.  Up north we can see that Eljudnir did indeed manage to break the siege on their throne but their lands are still mostly under enemy control.  In other news we hit evocation 4 this turn! Unlocking thunderstrike is extremely nice as that's one of the first battle magics that we have access to that can really turn the tide of a battle. Right now to thunderstrike though we need an A2 random and then also to spend a pearl on Power of the Spheres for another boost. Or to spend an air gem per cast which isn't going to happen. Nether Bolt/Bolt of Unlife are also pretty good on Armless Women. We continue on to evocation 5 and that will unlock storm to let our A1 mages cast thunderstrike too, in addition to some other cool astral evocations. 
gonadic io fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Jan 30, 2020 |
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Jan 29, 2020 23:25
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gonadic io posted:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLYEaAZFztA&t=167s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TazywZDuj9I don't suppose the clowns have access to anti-flying rituals/world spells to shut down that raiding? the mantises looks like a nightmare to deal with President Ark fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Jan 29, 2020 |
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Jan 29, 2020 23:47
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President Ark posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLYEaAZFztA&t=167s Air unlocks Storm and Perpetual Storm, both of which which shut down flying.
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Jan 30, 2020 00:35
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Do the mantises have any counter to perpstorm? For that matter, do the redcoats? Does storm gently caress up gun accuracy?
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Jan 30, 2020 00:45
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goatface posted:Do the mantises have any counter to perpstorm? For that matter, do the redcoats? Does storm gently caress up gun accuracy? Most of the mantises don't fly, it's only the thugs including the pretenders. Since they can thunderstrike too I'd say that storm is fine for them. Redcoats on the other hand, get very hosed up by it. They do also have 1) cap-only thunderstrikers and 2) cannons (which aren't affected) though so it's not the absolute worst.
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Jan 30, 2020 00:47
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Turn 27 Let's start with a slight recap from last turn. We pushed the mantises off of our cap, although at a large cost, and then decided to meet up with our reinforcements in a province currently occupied by mantises in order for our two forces not to get split up. However you might have spotted a small problem with this. If that province were owned by us there'd be no issue and the mantises could not catch our forces moving out from Karanaac. Instead it's a mantis province with a mantis force on. So if that mantis force moves to attack Karanaac, and the Karanaac force move to attack the mantises, which province do they fight in? The answer, in this case, was that the clown force doesn't move and they fight in Karanaac. poo poo. So the survivors of the previous battle, just 10 big mantises, 10 big clowns, and their commanders, get to repeat it. At least we get some province defence this time!   The mantises rush in, the mantis thug flies in. It doesn't help that one enormous clown decides to isolate himself and gets picked off very quickly. You know what also doesn't help? Because I assumed I was going to meet up with the force containing my prophet, who blesses everybody on the battlefield, I changed the scripting on all my clown mages to not cast bless. As a result I don't get the massive amount of strength, the defence from the throne, the HP from Karanaac, or the fire resistance vs the mantis thug. poo poo.  The clowns get whittled down and we don't manage to kill the Fa'khyrypon'rah. We fire off a few lightning bolts but it's just not enough.  In the end the few remaining clowns just leg it with the small exception of the mages, who bravely stay behind to die for no reason.  gently caress this was just a total shitshow. gently caress gently caress gently caress.  Hmm well moving on, at least our reinforcements have no trouble getting over now.  After all that we still haven't seen which of our vulnerable backline provinces that the mantis queen has jumped to. The squad of ~10 enormous clowns we've been sending out should be able to kill a lone, naked, enemy pretender in my dominion at least. We certainly clean up Maybe Mountains.  Our other cleanup force, going to clear the lizard province Greevil's Bog, encounter a little snag though. A little snag in the form of 800 gold of province defence. And this isn't even lovely militia, these are lizard warriors who have some pretty nasty pointed sticks. This is known in the business as a "PD trap" and I sure ran right into it.  We have just one 1st clown, who can't even cast Slapstick Display (because it doesn't do any good vs the pretender) and 10 enormous clowns. At least we have bless scripted this time.  One squad of clowns is on actual bodyguard duty and so sticks around to get jumped by the pretender. We cast a few evocations at her too.  The other squad is distracted by the large number of enemies and decide they'd rather run forward instead of staying back to fight the 12 foot praying mantis. I suppose I should have scripted them to attack large or flyers or something.  We manage to get the pretender to half health with a few lighting bolts but she manages to reach around the enormous bodyguard and snip the head off my only commander causing everybody to rout.   The clowns at the front, despite heroically slaughtering lizards without slapstick magic to protect them still have to retreat without a commander and end up getting picked off.   We lost 20 enormous clowns and 3 mages this turn to the mantises blindsiding us, this is so much worse than the merely inefficient trading that happened last turn. My non-ambushed bughunting squad retreat back to the capital and now we need a large force to overwhelm the lizards. We do at least make sure to patrol on the capital with Pongy and all the enormous clowns we have left to make sure that clown college isn't shut down for even one day. You can see here the Owl Quill research boosters we've been handing out to everybody.  Anglia's force has at least moved away, and our fort is going to finish this turn, so the clowns locked here can go join in now. I can only assume Anglia's force moved north ready to take Fennoscandia's cap.  Back west the mantises do very little damage to the fort of Karanaac so in order to avoid any more trickery we sit tight and what was supposed to be our reinforcements instead wait a turn for their own reinforcements.  gently caress, this turn was a total disaster. I still think that we can beat the mantises though as we have better mages and our elite troops, when blessed and buffed properly, still outclass theirs. Plus we have astral magic which, with a little more research, will really start paying dividends. For events I don't really talk about them but we get a continuous trickle of a couple of gems per turn and this one is no different. Another unit that you might have seen in the recruitment screens but I never get any of are Acrobats. They seem reasonably decent with really high defence and formation fighter but, again, they're not clowns. 
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Feb 1, 2020 14:20
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It's not funny if the clowns don't fall down sometimes
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Feb 1, 2020 15:49
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A comedy of errors
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Feb 1, 2020 17:46
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that's some smooth strategic finagling by the mantises, now to see if they can exploit it
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Feb 1, 2020 19:24
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Insect nation only mod nations game one day....
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Feb 1, 2020 23:39
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Ramc posted:Insect nation only mod nations game one day.... horrors are replaced with giant frogs
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Feb 2, 2020 01:32
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President Ark posted:horrors are replaced with giant frogs Nah just a large boot and leg that disappears off the top of the screen.
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Feb 2, 2020 02:23
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Telsa Cola posted:Nah just a large boot and leg that disappears off the top of the screen. no, that's what gifts from heaven does
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Feb 2, 2020 03:50
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President Ark posted:no, that's what gifts from heaven does Whats the lawn mower then?
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Feb 2, 2020 09:49
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Telsa Cola posted:Whats the lawn mower then? Blade Wind
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Feb 2, 2020 09:51
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President Ark posted:horrors are replaced with giant frogs And Rain of Toads still exists, it has greater implications here.
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Feb 2, 2020 16:07
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What else could you have? A generic beetle nation? Stag beetle warriors, bombardier beetle fire mages, dung beetle tramplers with their poison cloud emitting dung ball, amphibious water beetles, carrion beetle death and nature mages... Something in the FNWD spread?
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Feb 2, 2020 16:21
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You could have an actual spider nation. Could use things like Machaka's spiders as the bases for the chaff/elites, maybe add things like jumping spiders with in-battle flight like the eagle warriors, trap-door spiders with a fort defender bonus, a diving bell commander to let you go UW. Path-wise, I could see something like ASD.
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Feb 2, 2020 16:36
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goatface posted:What else could you have? A generic beetle nation? Stag beetle warriors, bombardier beetle fire mages, dung beetle tramplers with their poison cloud emitting dung ball, amphibious water beetles, carrion beetle death and nature mages... Actually there is a hallownest mod nation that has a ton of beetle troops. Neat nation to play.
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Feb 2, 2020 16:55
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LA antnation (i forgot what they're called) is ants infected with cordyceps e: termite nation with a focus on E magic and fortbuilding e2: parasite-themed nation (ticks, mosquitoes, bedbugs, etc) with blood magic President Ark fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Feb 3, 2020 |
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Feb 2, 2020 19:53
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If you're willing to include all arthropods, you could have an UW nation of crabs/lobsters/other crustaceans. Chaff troops like fiddlers, sacred heavy hitters like mantis or pistol shrimp. Life underwater imitates life on the land in many ways...
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Feb 2, 2020 23:57
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Breadmaster posted:If you're willing to include all arthropods, you could have an UW nation of crabs/lobsters/other crustaceans. Chaff troops like fiddlers, sacred heavy hitters like mantis or pistol shrimp. LA crab nation has a domkill as non-crabs in their dominion mutate into crabs
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Feb 3, 2020 00:12
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Moth themed nation with a whole bunch of natural weapons that destroy armour.
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Feb 3, 2020 00:23
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I made a Fiddler Crab nation way back in Dom 3. It was bad and dumb but the sprites were easy to make.
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Feb 3, 2020 03:31
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Hermit Crab nation with ludicrous number of different states for all units.
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Feb 3, 2020 03:35
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Tulip posted:Hermit Crab nation with ludicrous number of different states for all units. Terrain shapes for every terrain and unit.
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Feb 3, 2020 03:40
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their national spell levels up all your hermit crab units one level as they all line up and trade up on shells
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Feb 3, 2020 05:23
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'Undead' nation but its actually hermit crabs inhabiting the armour of fallen soldiers.
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Feb 3, 2020 08:55
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Pretender option that's a giant hermit crab inside the skull of a dragon.
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Feb 3, 2020 09:01
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| # ? Apr 25, 2024 20:41 |
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crab inside a colossal stone head
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Feb 3, 2020 14:02
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