gonadic io posted:Sorry, no. Here's all the names: https://pastebin.com/yY7YxNhU 
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Nov 8, 2019 22:54
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 I can't honk the poo poo out of you without getting closer. BaronOhShi fucked around with this message at 00:07 on Nov 9, 2019 |
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Nov 8, 2019 23:30
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presumably you have to play with the guy who made the map to get a province named after you
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Nov 8, 2019 23:34
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Squalid posted:presumably you have to play with the guy who made the map to get a province named after you They of course named one for themselves too, and in fact (minor spoiler) it will actually be one of the last unconquered provinces left on the map
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Nov 8, 2019 23:40
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BaronOhShi posted:
oh my god
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Nov 9, 2019 00:59
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That battle was a laughter.
ChaseSP fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Nov 11, 2019 |
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Nov 9, 2019 01:02
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Turn 5 Unfortunately I failed to save this turn so no screenshots. We'll just move on and pretend this isn't a problem (especially not one that happens more than once). At least this update won't break any tables and we'll be back to normal next turn. Still no bump with Fennoscandia, dammit! I want to paste their troops without the hassle of committing to a war. My clown expansion force lost one of the giant clowns when he got slightly ahead of the others and got hit by a charge from 5 heavy cavalry at once. The mage and 4 remaining troops just continue heading west into Arco's Folly. I also renamed the thirteenth clown in case he made it into the hall of fame, he's now Febrile And Wiry. My unicyclist force takes the small candle province losing only 1-2 unicyclists and a juggler. They're being so effective at expansion in fact that I'm going to split them into two squads - one heads north back into Iseenu Beforest since there's no indie province they can reach this turn and one heads south into Land Of Milk And Honey. I did win the contract of Shu'guu the Ichtyid mercenaries, that lake is going to be all mine! Underwater provinces aren't the best but there's roughly 10 of them in that lake so it'll add up. Since I wasn't actually next to the lake I hired them in a province that was 1 away meaning that this turn they'll take a shortcut through a province that's reporting a measly 30 militia. I know I've previously decried how bad generic amphibious troops are but there's 25 of these bad boys who also have nets and they'll easily cut through their number in militia. As an added bonus the province that they're taking further boxes Fennoscandia in. I also have a new expansion force leaving Kirkostaculis: 5 giant clowns lead by the thirteenth clown Blood Curdling. They're also heading west into Nile of Al'Nook. Finally we have news from discord! quote:[10:37 PM] Xanrick: Well a horrifying truth has reared its head in mods 3, Karanaac is my neighbour, right next door. I'm U, and possibly able to rush them down to save us all. Do I go for it? gonadic io fucked around with this message at 17:51 on Feb 7, 2021 |
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Nov 10, 2019 00:29
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Turn 6 And we're back in business! gonadic io posted:I know I've previously decried how bad generic amphibious troops are but there's 25 of these bad boys who also have nets and they'll easily cut through their number in militia. Good news I did win this fight with the amphibious mercenaries and gained access to the lake. Bad news:  Are you loving kidding me. They were militia! At least my other expansion went well, taking 3 provinces this turn with minimal losses    I'm not going to go so detailed into these battles as I did before but note the druid friendly firing one of his guys and two militia making it all the way to the thirteenth clown Febrile And Wiry, only to have this happen:  Turns out that even small clowns are pretty good against humans! One reason that the larger bless is so nice is that it makes regular ol' clowns size 3 so that their comically large kicks work on size 2 people i.e. most troops. We also got to see Fennoscandia's troops in action this turn including their bless. Looks like they've got a decent sized force and those trolls are one shotting militia too. Their bless is 15 shock res, 15 poison res, poison weapons, 4 defense, and 4 strength. The poison resistance is great for their foul vapour mages, the shock resistance is never bad but the defense and poison weapons and strength looks like they're trying to make their cap sacreds work. I do NOT think that's a good idea for reasons I've spoken about previously. We can see some more of their dominion too, they are running order, sloth, death, luck, and magic. Just imagine if they didn't have water or earth bless, or only 4 nature, and instead had growth scales! Earth is nice to have on a pretender when you don't have access to it but the water seems wasted to me.    On our west side we've found U's capital as discussed in the chatlogs last turn. Our clown force is actually going to take one of their cap circle provinces, Haerdalas' Grove, this turn again hoping for a bump. As soon as we kill one of the expansion parties of our neighbours we'll be free to take their cap mostly without resistance (or at least that's the theory). I'm a little less inclined to do it to U since they're already fighting Karanaac but I'll take a cap if I can. You can also see a throne province with 130 bear tribe (Marj's Timberland) and another one with 60 cynocephali in (Dragon Dreamcatcher). These dog-people actually berserk (unlike barbarians) and I'm not keen to go into either one of these with just 5 clowns.  Over on the east side the lone merc leader is coming back. I'm only keeping him alive to maybe get somebody else to bid on him but I think actually they just disband so I probably should have suicided him as punishment for being so poo poo. Our force of unicyclists lead by the Emerald Impaler are heading north into Maybe Mountains since I can't go any more east.  You can see we've also met Anglia the other side of Fennocandia, and I start discussing plans to kill Fenno immediately. Anglia are a mostly human nation so will get absolutely wrecked by foul vapours and we agree that Fenno needs to be taken out before they can become a real threat. Luckily they are restricted to just their cap circle so it looks like they've had some pretty poor expansion. I'm actually feeling pretty hemmed in with some of these huge provinces and thrones that I don't want to risk trying for. Just look at that southern throne in the caves! Killing a neighbour would be easier honestly. On the other hand all this trying for clashes with other expansion parties is making me feel like a bit of a bully 
gonadic io fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Nov 10, 2019 |
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Nov 10, 2019 22:04
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Imagine taking poison weapons on purpose.
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Nov 10, 2019 23:28
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Just wait until you see the hot tricks the fennoscandia pulls out, never underestimate the northmen and their sneaky tactics.
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Nov 11, 2019 09:27
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I had this dream of making the Elk Warriors work. It, uh, didn't work. I went for a rainbow mage PG, and prioritized getting the paths I wanted for the spells I wanted easy access to, and then cobbled together the bless out of that. At least the blessed Elk Warriors and the Tussers worked out pretty great against indies. Also hi it's me, I'm the Swedes, and yeah, the analysis earlier pretty much is what it is. They've got some cool trolls but outside of that their actual troops would be weak even in base Dominions 5. I probably hosed up in my research-priorities, I wanted to go for the Stallo(and the upgraded version that summons an entire tribe at once), since they basically seemed to be Hill Giants But Regenerating, which seemed like it could be a real pain in the rear end for most enemies. Looking forward to the madness everyone else gets up to.
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Nov 11, 2019 11:44
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Man, Dominions mods can be pretty great. Looking forward to seeing how this game goes! PurpleXVI posted:I had this dream of making the Elk Warriors work. It, uh, didn't work. I went for a rainbow mage PG, and prioritized getting the paths I wanted for the spells I wanted easy access to, and then cobbled together the bless out of that. At least the blessed Elk Warriors and the Tussers worked out pretty great against indies. They seem to be more Finnish and Sami, rather than Swedes.
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Nov 11, 2019 12:10
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Cyflan posted:They seem to be more Finnish and Sami, rather than Swedes. Well yes but I don't really have any funny jokes about the Finns, while the Swedes are a joke. Legitimately I feel like Fennoscandia would have benefited from leaning more into mythology than history, with like at most four or five "generic northmans" warriors and then going full wacky mythos poo poo like the Tussers for the rest.
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Nov 11, 2019 12:22
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PurpleXVI posted:Well yes but I don't really have any funny jokes about the Finns, while the Swedes are a joke. Yeah, that would have definitely been more interesting. There are plenty of interesting mythological creatures in finnish myths.
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Nov 11, 2019 13:58
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Anglia A large lower class working in the mines and factories for the profit of the landlords and propertied nobles huh, good thing times have changed since then! The nation of Anglia are based on the British in the Victorian era, so 1880-1900 pretty much. This is when the sherlock holmes novels were written, with wars in the colonies (including soon-to-be colonies like Zululand) abroad and with the prospect of WW1 still many years off. Mass production of rifles is well underway. All of the nations from this modpack, Firepower, seem a little not-quite-there-yet but the creator Enjoy (who I believe has an account here) has moved on from dominions so I guess we get what we get. Anglia get no national spells or items whatsoever, no summons no nothing. Anglia's defining unit is the humble Foot Guard. Any nation that can recruit sacred troops from every fort gets a decent boost by default and these guys aren't awful. They're relatively cheap with a 10-ammo rifle that deals piercing damage (although less than many bows???) and has the armour-piercing trait on top of that. Sadly in dominions ranged weapons are in a sorry state since any nation with air mages can cast Arrow Fend to cause 80% of shots to just vanish however these guys still have their piercing bayonets and with formation fighter they're no slouch in melee either. Once arrow fend is involved they usually get more effective when they have fired their 10 shots and then charge into battle.  They also get some okay cavalry both heavy and light but there's not much to say about these guys. They're good for attack-rear surprise squads but in general I would prefer to recruit foot guards if I can. The light cavalry get lances for the charge bonus and also you can get 4 other types of light cavalry without lances if you want. Why are there so many horse rider recruitables again?   There's also some camel cavalry for some reason?? These guys get a camel cavalry officer commander too but I honestly see no reason why you would ever recruit them except maybe if you were somehow on some desert themed map? Who knows.  Finally we get Anglia's last troop that they can recruit at any fort: the Maxim Gun. These are great and are like Foot Guard++ (but not sacred). Their gun is effectively 10 rifles at once and with a longer range. Getting two sword attacks makes them still a presence in melee and although it looks like they have 10 hp they actually have 30 since there's two secondshapes that represent the crew members dying off. If any of the shapes survive until the end of the battle then the crew members get replenished to full. You can only get one of these per turn from forts but they're cheaper than a single enormous clown so definitely worth getting every one of these you can.  Anglia also gets some cap-only sacreds in the Household Cavalry which are heavy cav. Sacred heavy cav are always pretty good in dominions because they get both a hitpoint and defense boost as well as the horse's hoof getting the benefits of whatever thunder/fire weapon bless you pick in addition to the rider's attacks. I'm not sure I'd place too much of a focus on these guys but they're worth recruiting even if you won't be able to mass them due to how expensive they are in recruitment points.  The troops I would say are at the lower end of good in the context of mods games, certainly much better than Fennoscandia's. They've got some neat tricks and the fact that they can mass sacreds makes up for a lot of other shortcomings. When it comes to mages Anglia have some very solid options with an okay amount of variety. First off the humble Engineer. These guys have 1E with 2.1 picks from FAWE. This means that 1/16 will have their two picks be in the same path and one in 640 will get +3 in a path. Useful crosspaths too with earth/fire, fire/water, probably others idk. Drain researcher and resource bonus on the mage you'll be massing (which these guys certainly are) are both very nice because it lets you take drain 3 for sure and some amount of sloth. Probably you wouldn't want to go all the way to sloth 3 without an expander since it'd mess up your early game but this explains why they've (presumably) been able to afford barkskin, thunder weapons, and money scales.  Your secondary mage is the medium, with 1xS, 1xD, and a 1.1xSD random. These women are nice to have for some diversity (including the protection against mind hunts) but you probably won't mass them due to your drain scales so you won't be skelespamming that often. Sadly there's no earth/astral cross path in the nation so it'll be difficult to forge crystal coins to get them up to astral 4 for mind hunt. It's unlikely you'll hit the 1 in 40 change of astral 3 too often but the astral 2s can get together and with one casting light of the northern star the rest can soul slay pretty well. Even the S1s can join in by spending a pearl on power of the spheres. They would be efficient gold cost researchers without drain and also have fortune teller so maybe there's an Anglia build without drain in there too.  The cap-only mage is a real nice one, he costs only 3 recruitment points and comes with mason which means you can recruit 1 every turn. He has F1A1E1 and then a +2 pick to FAWE (and another 10% of the same). This means that instead of the scattered randoms of the regular engineer, the great engineer will very often hit A3 for thunderstriking or E3 for legions of steel/strength of giants or F3 for, presumably, throwing fire at people better than a lesser fire mage could. They can also bladewind but with your troops that just seems like more of the same and is not that interesting. He's also less than 200 gold! This guy is definitely undercosted and is what moves the nation from passable to not actually bad.  All the other commanders are just random leaders of your troop types (admittedly with good leadership) except for the detective which seems to mostly be a Sherlock Holmes reference which is weird when there's a hero who is even more of a reference so who knows. I mean victorian brits also had lots of actual spies so I don't know why they made a detective the spy. Whatever.  The only non-mage commander that's interesting is the Light Artillery. These guys are pricey at 200 gold but get an AOE 5 cannon shot (firing every other round) which I believe also ignores arrow fend. They get a secondshape just like the Maxim guns and three melee attacks. For some unknown reason they have full slots so you can even put a shroud on them! I have absolutely no idea how the cannon blasts interact with thunder weapons but probably pretty well. They have 40 leadership, a huge siege bonus of 30, and are only 1 recruitment point to round it all off.  In short Anglia isn't doing any crazy poo poo but having 1) a recruit anyfort sacred, 2) solid drain mages, 3) a good cap mage means they pass the test that Fennoscandia failed. Not to mention the wacky poo poo you can get up to with thugging out light artilleries. gonadic io fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Feb 7, 2021 |
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Nov 11, 2019 21:31
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code:
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Nov 11, 2019 21:48
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atelier morgan posted:
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Nov 11, 2019 22:20
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Bows of War. Do it.
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Nov 11, 2019 22:21
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wiegieman posted:Bows of War. Do it. I've done this accidentally already, one of them picked up a bow of war as loot and it didn't disable the cannon one thing not listed in there is that anglia gets h1 priests for 35 gold instead of the 60 generics cost so if you really wanted to go all in with bows of war its really easy atelier morgan fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Nov 11, 2019 |
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Nov 11, 2019 22:40
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atelier morgan posted:I've done this accidentally already, one of them picked up a bow of war as loot and it didn't disable the cannon At least they don't have strength added *cough* pokemon *cough*
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Nov 11, 2019 22:42
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Strength added is just like a drop in the bucket for those - have fun having all your commanders/mages wandering into tall grass and getting murdered too. Really, this thread's gotten me to download and play around with a bunch of mod nations, and there's certainly some fascinating stuff among the more nonstandard stuff. To randomly pick one nation I've seen: -80% base province income, but the ability to recruit one income generator per fort plus super cheap researchers/communion slaves along with 6/7 path mages only costing 35 upkeep (though their recruit cost is normal) is definitely interesting.
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Nov 12, 2019 05:10
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Lord Koth posted:Strength added is just like a drop in the bucket for those - have fun having all your commanders/mages wandering into tall grass and getting murdered too. In the mod game gonadic was talking about, the plant pokemon nation took a +8 str bless because their sacred Bulbasaurs had an AN damage leech seed attack that did one(1) damage. That's actually still pretty good, especially en masse, but the modder forgot to make it so strength wasn't added to that attack. Or even to make it added at a reduced fraction like for most vanilla ranged weapons. So with the +8 str bless, they dealt 9 AN damage per shot. On a recruit-anywhere sacred. They could easily melt whole armies with just that. Citation: They melted my whole armies of dwarves with like 21 prot, but only slightly above human hp.
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Nov 12, 2019 06:36
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That'd explain why that portion didn't seem quite so bad to me, since that has since seemingly been fixed. According to the in-depth descriptions at least, the ranged attacks now mostly work like others of that type, generally only incorporating some portion of STR rather than all of it, with the amount typically being 1/2 or 1/3 - leech seed is the latter, incidentally (and is base -1 damage). Not that massed 3(4?)AN damage isn't still dangerous, but definitely nowhere near as bad as what you described. The "every nation gets a whole slew of very cheap assassination spells" is still going strong though.
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Nov 12, 2019 07:57
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I had a lot of fun trying out the randomly generated nationgen factions. With the right settings, they can even be balanced.
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Nov 12, 2019 10:25
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Night10194 posted:I adore that the clowns are written in the exact same style as normal Dominions fluff. life in the circus corresponds in many ways to that on land being very funny, there is nothing left to attain but godhood
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Nov 12, 2019 14:56
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Turn 7gonadic io posted:My unicyclist force takes the small candle province losing only 1-2 unicyclists and a juggler. They're being so effective at expansion in fact that I'm going to split them into two squads The good idea fairy is coming home to roost with this one. The split squads have taken a lot more attrition than they would have together and they've still only been able to average 1 province every other turn each anyway! Case in point was their battle this turn in Maybe Mountains where almost all of the unicyclists died and now I'll have to recombine the blobs anyway.   In Haerdalas' Grove, U's cap circle province, we cleared out some more druids and dark vines for them. Aren't we such a good neighbour! We lost a clown due to a bleeding spell from the druids unfortunately, now I was kind of wishing I'd taken regeneration bless. N10 for larger and regeneration would have been incredibly pricey (but pretty funny). We also got some cool events this turn! 500 gold and some nature gems is not bad at all. Finally we were successful on our bid for Obscuro The Illusionist, the mercenary mage. Obscuro 1) sounds like he would fit in at a circus, and 2) gives us our first research points in the game, on turn 7. Our research has been literally 0 so far, and will continue to be dogshit for a while. Every mage that we produce (every 2 turns) immediately gets given a posse of giant clowns and sent out into the world.  Talking of sending clowns out into the world, Brazenly Breathtaking the Thirteenth Clown is once again taking an extra big squad of 8 clowns and is heading north into the lizard province, Greevil's Bog. Since lizard warriors can be scary he's going to take along one of the unicyclist squads to use as chaff. "But Gonadic IO" you say, "since you have your prophet is there anyway wouldn't it have been better to use Divine Blessing on him instead of wasting the Thirteenth Clown's script on it?" Yes. Yes it would have.  On the east side we're pretty much expanded out already. We can't go any further without going via Fennoscandia's cap circle which admittedly is certainly an option. Our route into the caves is blocked by the hefty throne on Shattered Nap. I certainly don't want to take this any time soon as each enormous clown is very precious to me and I'd lose too many.   On the west side it's a pretty similar story. There's another of U's cap circle provinces we could take, or a province with 60 angry dog-people in, or there's a throne with 200 fire snakes. We meet both U and Eljudinar in that direction. I had really hoped not to be next to the cold ghosts but there you go. At least our dominion is pretty pushed out in that direction so we don't have to worry about their cold/death scales just yet. The only place that we can still expand is north past the lizards so our forces regather to head in that direction. Maybe we can get a bump with Ejudijnar although I'm much less confident that it'd go well for me.  Talking of U, we have one of their cap circle provinces. In general it's a declaration of war to be holding onto opponent cap circles so I agree to give it back to them - I get 60 gold per turn that I hold it so I sneakily put 1 PD in to stop U from sending just a single scout to claim it back. Thanks to the gold event we are even able to 1) start a fort in Jessica's Oasis which has a nice high amount of recruitment points so I can afford maximum clownage, and 2) start to recruit one of these big boys:  Ancient Clowns are what really rounds off this nation. Their randoms are two picks of A/W/S, and one pick of F/A/W/S which in practice means they roughly average out to A2W2S3. A 7 path mage with holy 3 and also decent stats for 550 gold is a pretty good rate! Normally they're a pitiful size 5 but larger works well on them too giving them a total of 72 hp! Great thug chassis, great casters, good randoms - they are top notch. Every one of these I lose will be very painful. The high astral gives them another use that's not immediately obvious: magic dueling rocks. Karanaac are pretty vulnerable to magic duel because even the boosted elder stones actually count as just S1 and an S3 or S4 can sweep them away easily. It is, of course, high risk high reward since there's still a pretty good chance to draw or lose the duel. In summary I'm feeling pretty happy about my position so far. The map feels much tighter than I was expecting but my two immediate neighbours are both pushed up to their cap circles and I have a decent chunk of the bottom of the map. Between me no longer needing mages for expansion and my second fort coming online I'm hoping my research will start to pick up. I head to evocation 1 immediately which makes clown mages at least a presence in combat and then construction 2. With my plentiful air mages I plan to have several Air Quills (cheap research boosters) on production for pretty much the entirety of the game. gonadic io fucked around with this message at 12:08 on Jan 5, 2021 |
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Nov 13, 2019 21:20
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So I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what U is about, but what about Eljudnir? They seem to be like a slightly different-flavoured Lemuria, as far as I can tell.
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Nov 13, 2019 22:01
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PurpleXVI posted:So I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what U is about, but what about Eljudnir? They seem to be like a slightly different-flavoured Lemuria, as far as I can tell. Next post will be a nation summary for them
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Nov 13, 2019 22:04
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PurpleXVI posted:So I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what U is about, but what about Eljudnir? They seem to be like a slightly different-flavoured Lemuria, as far as I can tell. Eljudnir is very cool, I played them here. Nearly all your recruitable units have cold power, cold aura, and ice protection but they are also vulnerable to fire, which was an issue for me when I checked through the other nations in the game and noticed very nearly all of them had easy access to fire magic. They're not quite freespawn but you do have recruitable priests who can be set to Summon Allies to generate a couple random skeletons a turn, some of which are really fun like skeleton chariots and unique skeleton horses. They've got a couple weird gimmicks like starting with a national hero instead of a scout who has something like 30 different xpshapes as he gains experience, most of which just grant slightly more hp/strength/stats but eventually gets a powerful AoE ranged attack, and having some sort of portal to the netherworld in your capital that you can send a death mage into to spawn 1 ghost with homesickness a turn but that same powerful AoE ranged attack, presumably as a defense against having your cap taken. Additionally several of your most expensive commanders have extra effects like auto-casting a battlefield wide Fear effect or having a small chance to summon extra skeletons each turn in your dominion. Your main strengths besides just being a skeleton nation with good death magic are having some really good national spells, including in combat, and some really clever unique items that do things like exchange the soul of a living unit for a target commander (essentially a can't fail assassination in exchange for losing the commander carrying the item) and other weird effects. Main weaknesses are of course that all of your units are undead and thus very vulnerable to banishment spam or other spells that target undead, most of your units being really dependent on the cold to do anything with all the cold power/ice protection, everything being weak to fire, and having a dominion that spreads death scales outside of your borders which tends to upset your neighbors. I tried to take a bless that dealt with some of these but your only sacreds are cap-only death knights until you get some summonable flying demon ghost horses at a fairly high level of conjuration research. But man they are so fun. Look at this crazy spell 
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Nov 14, 2019 00:58
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 This is U. U is a bit strange, and probably plays the least like how a normal Dominions nation should play of any of the mod nations in this game. U's lore is a sort of mythological fever-dream, drawing from scraps of the weird imaginings of Europeans of the Terra incognita of the interior of Africa, myths surrounding the legendary continent of Mu, mixed with references to philosophical thought experiments, and the fantastic imagery of Hieronymus Bosch. From a game play standpoint, it is a nation with severe limitations, if one wishes to play it as a normal dominions nation. In its place, it offers dozens of custom spells and summons that offer a variety of options. Some of these options entail the possibility of a wholly different strategy and play style, making U function as a very different nation depending on your choice of pretender and overall strategy. That said, your options for recruitable troops and commanders are pretty limited:  First up, the humble foundation of all things U:  The Protozoon is not much to look at, particularly the lack of offensive power and fairly poor defensive stats means that they will die in droves. However, they are absurdly cheap at the cost of one gold. Plus, if you look at them through the lens of gold-cost to hit points, they are far and away the best deal you're going to find, and, if nothing else, they can keep your opponent's troops tied up while your own more valuable units do their job. Being low-cost and at size 1, they benefit disproportionately well from buffs and remain useful into the late game as chaff, as being mindless they will never run from battle. There are several drawbacks of course. Mindless magic units will dissipate automatically on the battlefield without the presence of commanders possessing magic leadership. Fortunately nearly all of U's commanders have at least some of this. The bigger problem is being able to transport them in sufficient quantities to fight in offensive battles. Since they are only effective in very large numbers, you end up needing to dedicated magic commanders to assist shuffling them around, pretty much necessitating the recruitment of specialized U commanders. Attrition tends to be high, so you will constantly need to resupply your numbers. This can make your offensives ponderous when it takes multiple turns to bring up reinforcements. Another big drawback is their vulnerability to large evocation magic, particularly spells that hit the whole battlefield, which destroy these feet and arms very quickly. In summation, they are a powerful tool, but one that needs a great deal of support to reach its full potential. Most of the decisions I made this game went into bringing out this potential. Next up, the Lilliputian:  While these troops also benefit from being size 1 (fitting 6 to a square) and have a good defense stat, their benefits do not offset the numerous downsides. Terrible morale, terrible magic resistance and no protection beyond their ability to dodge attacks in melee makes them incredibly fragile. Compared to the Protozoon they essentially have most of the same weaknesses while possessing positives that don't make up for it. There's some case to be made for mixing in a few in armies to make use of their nets, but there's only a handful of situations that would make it worthwhile in my experience.  This is most basic blemmye troop and reflects some common themes amongst U's troops the rather well. Low morale and magic resistance combined with zero protection leaves them incredibly vulnerable. This is offset by what can be considered great combat stats for the cost, (though average in the grand scheme of things) particularly their hp, but low morale combined with their tendency to die in droves is not exactly a great combination. As such, they generally will only be effective if you can swarm opponents in large numbers. Having two attacks helps with this, and, unlike other U troops, these guys can be recruited from any province without a fort. This helps a bit to make up for the generally high attrition they are going to suffer.  Epiphagos have some potential. With a +3 berserk, two attacks (one of which is armor piercing) and enough hp for the berserker status to matter fairly often, these aren't bad. Like most of U's troops, they are going to need to be massed to be effective, which can cause serious supply problems and unrest. The cost starts being an issue as well, since they aren't any more survivable than a basic tribesman, and U's gold income is, at best, going to be half of any other normal nation. I could see using them when fighting more heavily armored troops that have limited offensive power.  Weird size 3 tramplers. I've never spent 9 gold on these, but I will end up with some of them through other means. Only real standout here is the high combat speed. They tend to get owned like most size 3 tramplers do against standard size 2 troops.  The Sciapod Athlete is an elite(?) U troop. They have good stats, but unfortunately at size 3 and one melee attack they don't really get as much mileage out of it as they could. They have Sloth Power -1, which means they get better stats in provinces with production scales. I see them as a semi-viable option when playing U with good scales and little/no bless, although they are liable to die in droves to any ranged attack.  The cap-only Dancer of the Foot U's only normal sacred recruitable troop. It generally follows in the vein of Sciapod Athlete, though fortunately it trades the sloth/production power for a strong magic attack. With only 1 attack on a size 3 body, these guys aren't going to completely tear into densely packed troops, but they will hit consistently and for good damage. These are probably the best option for expansion, but considering their fragility, it is best to support them with Protozoons or other chaff to absorb lances and arrows in their place whenever possible.  An unusual recruitable variant of a low level conjuration summon in vanilla Dominions. Blemmye cave cows have a slightly better strength, allowing their acid-spit attack to have slightly better range and damage. They also provide supplies. Even though they cost 15 gold to recruit, they do not cost upkeep, a fact that I overlooked for quite some time and has improved my opinion of them. I think they may have some purpose in the right army compositions, however the very short range, and the very real risk of friendly fire could cause problems.  Sciapod champions have decent offensive power and pretty impressive stats in provinces with production. They do require a giant commander to lead them, and like the athletes, they seem to be best suited for a scales strategy.  Another oddball. Basically impossible to mass in large numbers, these troops possess the only thing that might be considered armor in the form of the the bolder acting like a shield. In practice, I've not found this to be very effective. As units that trample with a combat speed of 7 and 8 encumbrance they rarely make much of an impact before dying.  Gavagai are expensive and rather vulnerable to getting swarmed and killed, however they can pack a punch if used carefully. They also have great siege warfare bonuses and make U fairly competent at siege warfare. Now, onto commanders:  If you are going to use protozoons (and you should) you're probably going to need these Megatriskelios commanders to move them around. Other than their lack of protection, they actually have some great stats, such that I would expect them to fair well against assassination attempts. Being a mindless commander they will always fight to the death, which is generally a good thing if you've got protozoons on the field, provided you can spare the commander recruitment points to replace them.  The Anthropophagos is the lynch pin of about half of the strategies available to U. Blood is one of the rare schools magic in which having one access to a single rank is a viable base to work from, and given enough time, will provide access to extremely powerful commanders, troops and battlefield magic. The most important factor of a blood mage is its cost, and the anthropophagos at 35 gold is a steal. There are a couple of downsides of course with the pop-kill trait and 1 unrest generated per turn which work directly against the goals of converting your population into blood slaves, but they are manageable. They make for very poor research mages even when they hit their 50% roll for a rank of earth magic. You also won't generally want large stacks of them in a single province due to the unrest and pop-kill effects. And like all of U's recruitable mages, they get a penalty at forging equipment adding one to the cost of all forging. The largest hurdle for fully exploiting blood magic is the difficulty that U has with massing mages. At the start of the game U is stuck with only being able to build palisades, which do not provide any bonus to commander recruitment points. This means that at best you can recruit its most basic mages once every two turns. You can only partially circumvent this by building more forts and recruitment centers since you still pay the full cost for labs, while having halved gold income. Since U's blood mages are such poor researchers you are have a hard split between recruiting blood hunters to start your blood economy or recruiting researchers. I generally opted to stay out of blood initially and to try and focus on hitting my major research goals until I got past the bottleneck of commander point recruitment. That meant I spent the majority of the early game recruiting these guys:  Make no mistake, Priests of the palm are very bad mages. They have very few spells that are worthwhile in battle except for defensive buffs. They could potentially use an earth gem to cast earth power and hit e2 magic, but this does not substantially improve their situation. (Also earth gems are way too important to U to burn carelessly, but more on that later.) One saving grace is that 55 gold for a sacred priest mage is a good price, and they make a pretty good basic research mage, although again you will only be recruiting one every other turn from your forts. Keeping up in research is a struggle, and you have very little access to good research boosters, particularly in the early game. A side-benefit is that priest of the palm per temple has the ability to summon one dancer of the foot per turn, which is generally worth doing once you can spare some mages from research. What priests of the palm are good at has to do with the specific peculiarity of U's national spells. At level 4, 6 and 8 research of all of the schools of magic, barring blood and construction, you gain access to a set of national spells that summon different types of commander. These commanders are typically mages that have focused one type of spell or effect. The spells available at level 4 can be cast by all priests of the palm. Generally speaking, it is in this fashion that you gain access to most of your battlefield spells.  The Satrap mage is a major investment for a U player. Between the gold cost, cap only status and four recruitment points, you are only likely to have a handful of these. As a standard dominions mage, they are barely more powerful than a priest of the palm with only one rank of earth magic. However, their main purpose is not for casting spells in battle, they exist almost solely for the purpose of casting the most powerful of U's national spells using their +1 bonus to ritual spell casting in order to hit earth 2 and holy 3. In particular, most of the national summons at level 6 research or greater require a satrap to do the summoning.  Lastly, the Gavagai Chieftain seems like just a commander version of the gavagai troop. There is one thing that is noteworthy about them however, and it actually plays a major part in the strategy of playing U. This commander has the promotion ability, which means that after it accumulates a set amount of experience points, the commander will upgrade to a new form. In this case, the upgraded form is the Gavagai King, who gains some minor earth magic and priestly powers, and mostly importantly, gains the mason trait. The mason trait gives the commander the ability to construct a fort at one level above what can normally be constructed by a nation. In the case of U, this allows the upgrading of palisades to fortresses, and allowing of 2 points of commander recruitment per turn. This can revolutionize your mage recruitment efficiency, particularly for your cap-only satraps. Getting to 70 experience in a reasonable amount of time is not a small task however. The best method I have found is to recruit a few gavagai chieftains to reinforce your initial expansion army (bringing along additional troops whenever possible) and have them hang out at the edges of the main melee. If you are lucky, they will get a few kills in and avoid getting swarmed and killed. Killing enemy troops in melee is the fastest method to accumulate experience, and if all goes well you can pretty consistently get one or more gavagai kings around the start of year 2. Xanrick fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Feb 7, 2021 |
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Nov 14, 2019 04:27
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After reading through all that lore I'm now suffering from em dash poisoning. Please send help - preferably consisting of a trained grammarian or other practitioner - or else I may never recover.
Arcvasti fucked around with this message at 05:50 on Nov 14, 2019 |
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Nov 14, 2019 05:18
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I love the U lore.
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Nov 14, 2019 05:23
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U is lit holy poo poo please show us the summonable commanders later woww
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Nov 14, 2019 05:31
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so many words
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Nov 14, 2019 05:49
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PurpleXVI posted:I love the U lore. It takes like 3x as many words to describe things as it needs to, but yeah I've actually come around on the U lore, especially as I became more familiar with the stuff it's based on. Oh and also another thing U has EGGS. You get EGGS either by spending a hundred earth gems or whenever the World Egg pretender awakens. EGGs are immobile commanders that do nothing much for about six months, then turn blood red and mature. A mature EGG gains astral three and a whopping 300 research points, but will die in the very next month. However, U also has a set of national spells called "Syzygies" that are only castable by mature EEGS. There are like ten of those things, all of which have pretty powerful effects that consume the casting EGG, but the two most important ones to your EGG ENGINE are the Syzygy of Rebirth and the Syzygy of Origination. The Syzygy of Rebirth will send the EGG casting it back into immaturity for another six month and then, six months later, a second EGG will appear in a random U-controlled province. Since the EGG is immobile, and it's maturation is quite useless without a lab, this is usually pretty inconvenient. That's where the Syzygy of Origination comes in: That consumes the casting EGG to make an item called an "Ioun Focus", that allows EGGS and only EGGS to teleport at will while they hold it, without needing a lab. Having a few of those around makes the randomly appearing EGGS that the Syzygy of Rebirth summons possible to transport. In summary the EGG economy is a whole other weird and unique thing that U has in addition to all the stuff above.
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Nov 14, 2019 05:52
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Arcvasti posted:That consumes the casting EGG to make an item called an "Ioun Focus", that allows EGGS and only EGGS to teleport at will while they hold it, without needing a lab. Having a few of those around makes the randomly appearing EGGS that the Syzygy of Rebirth summons possible to transport. If they don't spawn on a lab you'd still need to slap it on some other commander, run him out there and have him pass it over before you can warp your fresh EGG back, though. So it seems like it's not always gonna make a huge difference.
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Nov 14, 2019 05:57
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What's more, you need a specialized, summoned commander to carry the Ioun Focus over to the egg to 'tend' to it. All other commanders are not allowed to equip the Ioun Focus. It's a very crazy system, but one of the most interesting U strategies. Unfortunately I feel like most Dominions games don't last long enough to truly reap the benefits since you really need a 9 in a field of research for the best options and a ton of turns to build up your egg economy before you slow down your production too much by selecting options other than rebirth.
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Nov 14, 2019 06:07
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PurpleXVI posted:If they don't spawn on a lab you'd still need to slap it on some other commander, run him out there and have him pass it over before you can warp your fresh EGG back, though. So it seems like it's not always gonna make a huge difference. You have like six months to do it it's probably not that hard to send a scout or something from a lab a couple provinces away. EDIT: Oh yeah I'd forgotten that normal commanders can't even shuttle the things. On the other hand the commanders that can can also use their teleport function pretty sure so that makes it even faster.
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Nov 14, 2019 06:15
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And here I thought that the freaking clown nation would be the weirdest one in the game.
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Nov 14, 2019 12:03
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Getting trampled to death by a thousand mindless, stinky feet - surely the best way to leave this world.
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Nov 14, 2019 17:23
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