|
 This thread is the exciting conclusion to the Newbad Trilogy For those new to Dominions, it's a turn-based high-fantasy somewhat-dark strategy game where your galaxy brain strats are regularly upended because a turkey blew up an archangel's brain or a militaman with a katana cut off an extradimensional invader's kneecaps and made it run away while making GBS threads itself in terror. The only thing more dangerous than your enemies and their plots is the RNG and your own hubris. Most of the nations are themed around some real-world mythos or ethnicity, but usually with some sort of interesting twist. Winning is accomplished by killing your enemies, claiming a pre-set number of the Thrones scattered around the map or making the game go on for long enough that everyone else quits out of frustration. The Newbad games were started up on the SA Dom 5 discord to accomodate new players, those who'd been in few games, and definitely hadn't won one before. The first Newbad was won by Arcvasti as Arcoscephale(the fantasy Greeks) because Kremath hosed up the game settings, the second Newbad was won by OOrochi as Agartha(cave incels carving animated realdolls from stone) because he was the least bad and everyone missed how close he was to grabbing the win. Dominions is organized into three eras, in descending order of magic and ascending order of technology: the Early Age, Middle Age and Late Age. The three Newbad games are also arranged in that order. Generally most games are set in the Early and Middle Ages because the Late Age has less variety of nations, the nations are a tad more similar(on account of many fantastic beasts having died out or interbred with humans to the point of diluting their weirder attributes) and because the Late Age features a lot of Blood magic which in the vanilla game is a tad broken in places(for this reason, most SA games of Dominions 5 uses the JBBM balancing mod to fix the game a bit, I recommend it). Since the game is a game of shitloads of unknowns, anything your scouts(or scryers) don't have eyes on you have only the vaguest of knowledge of, this thread will obviously be somewhat "behind" in terms of reporting the action, about 25 turns, because no one wants to give away their hyper-genius strats in time for anyone to counter them.
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2020 20:41
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 19:14 |
|
|
Pretender Design: Mictlan The first part of joining a Dominions game is to pick your nation and design your Pretender. I played Mictlan in the first and second games, and I'll be picking up the mantle again in this game. Some nations exist in more than one era, as they undergo various historical events and cultural revolutions that change them. Mictlan... uh... doesn't really change much. In the Early Age they're a bunch of fursuiters themed after the Aztecs who sacrifice blood slaves for holy power and have good usefully varied magic, their main fursuiters are cats. In the Middle Age, they're a bunch of fursuiters themed after the Aztecs who've gotten on the wagon and off the blood, and their main fursuiters are birds. In the Late Age, they're a bunch of fursuiters themed after the Aztecs who sacrifice blood slaves for holy power and have good and varied magic, their main fursuiters are once again cats, but this time they've also got a bunch of scaly frog fursuiters in in their ranks. This low amount of variance is honestly extremely rare and I think Mictlan is the only one that remains this unchanged.  What we're seeing here is an overview of our recruitable troop options, a general idea of what Mictlan does, any special rules for them and what sites they start with in their capital(your cap sites provide your baseline gem income, gems are used to power ritual and combat spells, as well as forging magic items for commanders). While most other nations start as cavemen/bronze age in the Early Era and advance to the middle ages by the Late Era, usually fielding crossbows and heavy cavalry, Mictlan fields the exact same shirtless angry dudes in the Early Era and Late Era, with a few small exceptions which we'll get to once the LP starts going properly. In the Early Age, their strongest magic access is Fire, in the Middle Age it's Nature and Air, in the Late Age it's Water. In all three ages they have great access to Blood magic. The bit about blood sacrifices is also important, because one way to lose is to have no followers worshipping you at all, i.e. having your Dominion reduced to zero. Most nations have a prophet, a god and temples that spread them passively. Mictlan ONLY spreads it by sacrificing blood slaves. On the one hand this means they can spread it more aggressively than anyone else since a single temple can have multiple slaves getting chopped up at once, but on the other hand it means that a disruption to your blood sacrificing in some way, say if someone prevents you from gathering blood slaves for long enough, can put you at risk of getting killed simply due to loss of faith. The bless bonuses are also nice, every nation gets to create a custom bless that affects their god, their prophet and any sacred units they have, and Mictlan gets bonuses to theirs(though the exact bonus varies by era). This is real good for Mictlan, since most nations can only recruit their sacred units in their capital province, putting a rather hard cap on them, but Mictlan in all three Ages can recruit sacred units in any province with a fort and a temple. The real "gently caress you" for Late Age Mictlan is that while everyone else has learned to build advanced fortifications(and better fortifications give better economic advantages as well as making you harder to besiege), Mictlan still basically just makes a fence out of sticks and calls it a day, then goes back to getting bloody up to the elbows. On top of that, their forts are also extra expensive, 750 gold rather than the standard 600 gold.  Making your God is the next fun part. First you choose a "chassis," i.e. what the god is. Is it a giant ancient Titan? A weird-looking rock? A ghost? A wicker man that enough people believed in that it came alive and started stepping on people? The old Pantokrator's favourite mug that got delusions of grandeur and has escaped from the cupboard after his disappearance? There are a few universal chassis that almost everyone can pick, some that are split up by "pantheon"(i.e. available to all the vaguely Greek nations, for instance) and some nations have a few just for them. Some pretenders are amazing warriors right out of the box, others have the advantage of being humanoid(meaning they can equip more boosting items in the late game), others are immobile(real hard to kill, not too expensive, but require magic to move around if you want to use them offensively) and yet others are no big deal themselves, being Just A Dude. Now, why would you pick Just A Dude when you can be a dragon? Because JAD is much cheaper than the dragon, meaning you can buy a stronger bless for your goons and better "scales" for your Dominion. Your scales basically determine your economic advantages and also to an extent what random events can affect you. I go for a pretender chassis unique to EA and LA Mictlan: The Smoking Mirror. You only see one of his forms here, but he's Just A Dude who can also turn into a giant jaguar. He's also reasonably cheap. When making him, there are a few things I keep in mind: I want decent scales, I don't expect him to do any fighting, my bless is important, and I need him to unlock some of the magic paths I'd normally have poo poo access to. For instance, I have zero Death or Earth on my normal dudes, so unlocking it here gives me some more options. I also make sure to get him good Blood access since most of the worthwhile Blood spells would require some powerful buffing items to cast with my recruitable mages. Death and Blood is also an important crosspath for Mictlan. The candle represents my starting Dominion strength, it can go from 1 to 10 and determines how many positive candles you can have in a province, how well your own dominion spreads and also how many Sacred units you can recruit per turn in a province(assuming you have the money, recruitment points and resources for it), and the following symbols are my "scales," determining how idyllic or awful life under the God of Mictlan is. Order goes up, it helps passively reduce unrest and gives me an income bonus. This is mostly to balance out the Sloth that's next, it reduces my income and how many resources I get. I don't care about resources since they get spent on heavy armor and weapons. My dudes barely have shirts! Temperature scales? Jacking them up all the way. This is the usual Dominions meta, excepting some nations who do their best in either cold or heat, the economic penalties of maxing it out in either direction are the same. But for most nations, Heat is preferable since it doesn't slow their troops down the way snowy provinces do. Some nations are natively snowfaring or have primarily flying units(like Xibalba, Caelum and Nazca), so they may as well benefit from throwing up barriers to other nations. Mictlan suffers a bit less from heat than from cold, and maxing out the heat prevents winter cold from snowing my provinces up(since the game has passing seasons that can affect the map and some events). Growth is another +economy scale, and if you maintain it for long enough over the game, provinces you control and have Dominion in slowly get better populated and yield more money and resources. Luck is because I've gotten burned enough times. Ask people and most will probably go Misfortune 1, either direction means more random events, but obviously the direction it's scaled in determines if those events are primarily good or bad. Good events can range from beneficial temporary scales to huge windfalls of money and gems, while negative events can, at worst, near-halve a province's population while spawning AI attackers that go berserk on your capital. Magic primarily gives your researchers a bonus, but also affects some events and interacts with magic resistance. To afford all those, I choose to make my God "Imprisoned." He can either be free, meaning he arrives on turn 1. Dormant, meaning he wakes up on or around turn 12. Or Imprisoned, which means he busts out on or around Turn 36. This is somewhat of a gamble since two of my bless options are "Incarnate Only," meaning that until Turn 36 they're inactive(they'll also become inactive again if my God gets killed and hangs around in limbo waiting to get resummoned). My sacrificial goons hit harder than usual, are harder to hit than usual, have Undying(which means they can go some distance into the negative HP before dying, though if the battle ends while they're in negative HP they'll die for real if there are no regeneration effects active on them), radiate immense heat that gives enemies heatstroke(and possibly sets them on fire) and they have a Blood Vengeance effect. Any time a unit affected by Blood Vengeance takes damage, their attacker must pass an MR12 check(their MR, Magic Resistance, plus 2d6 vs 12 plus 2d6.), if they fail it, they eat just as much damage as they inflicted, untyped and armor-ignoring. In man vs man combat this likely won't matter that much, but say an expensive enemy mage hits 50 of my holy goons with a "kill ur rear end dead lol"-spell. He has to pass 50 MR checks or he gets pasted in return. The late game has a decent number of those sorts of shenanigans, so I look forward to that screwing someone over who isn't me. 
PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Jan 14, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2020 21:26
|
|
|
Jack2142 posted:I am Marignon I keep forgetting to save screenshots. C'mon, Jack, how's Ramc going to judge us harshly, yet hilariously, without a screenshot of your pretender? Do it for the e-fame.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2020 01:42
|
|
|
What I lack in galaxy brain pretender design, I make up for in galaxy brain game strategies. Arcvasti posted:You assumed wrong, but miraculously no one actually picked them anyways. This is a highly virtuous group of players here. A good number of the players were the same crowd from Newbad1 and 2, and by more-or-less unanimous agreement, people tended to pick successor nations to the ones they played in Newbad2 if they had any Late Age descendants. Since no one played Sceleria, Lemuria wasn't first in line as anyone's pick. Donkringel posted:Also taking your god imprisoned when you have a very scary blood nation... The meta aspect that you're missing here is that almost everyone in this game has played with me before, so I could play one of the Pokemon mod nations in an otherwise Vanilla game and no one would be scared of me. 
|
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2020 11:49
|
|
|
I'm honestly surprised you say LA Agartha's recruit-anywhere sacreds aren't good, my brief experience with them is that with even a mediocre bless and the small amount their commander version can lead, they'll absolutely blender most LA indies and make your initial expansion very painless.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2020 17:46
|
|
|
Mictlan Turn 01  I'm back.   After aeons trapped within the lightless depths of the Cthinema, I have broken free, free to lead my fursuiters once more! But it's obvious that something went wrong last time, we're going to need new strategies, new plans, new fursuits... new blood.  More people, which means more blood, more farms... but some things never change. We're going to need a prophet, hmmm... how about... "ready player two, now w/ fortnite"? Yeah, that's a good one. And we sure as hell aren't going to blind expand on turn one. See, in pace with the Late Age being more "advanced" among the playable nations, more crossbows, more armor, the same is true for the indies. The provinces are more populous, and thus better defended, and the defenders have a nasty habit of having stuff like heavy cavalry, pikes and crossbowmen ready, rather than the shirtless losers(completely different from my shirtless losers) from the Early Age. And when those do pop up, they're usually in three times the number. Sometimes you can steal a march on everyone else by expanding on turn 1, taking a gamble, if you've got a big chunky pretender and your dominion's spread into a neighbouring province so he'll have his blesses up there. However, we have neither an awake expander pretender nor dominion spread anywhere, because we haven't started sacrificing people yet. Right now, one single bad -dominion event could kill me. So I'm gonna need to make some priests and get them started on chopping up slaves and carving out their hearts pronto. On the bright side, once I do get that started, I can make some items that'll let me get way more dominion-expansion out of a single temple than anyone else, but until then I'm fragile in a way no one else is. It'll also give me a bit of early trouble spreading my beneficial scales to any provinces I take. Once I do get some dom-spread going, the mechanic is that each chance of candle(dominion, indicated by white candles for friendly, black for hostile)-spread is a roll(usually around 80%, though it improves by 5% for every 5 temples you have, which also increases the max dom per province, and can start lower if you have low starting dominion strength). Every successful roll increases the dominion by one white candle in the province it's made in, up to the max number. If it hits the max number, it randomly "spills over" into a neighbouring province. If said province has any black candles, there's a 50-50 chance of knocking one of them out or doing nothing, though a few things, like the Throne of Bureaucracy, the Throne of the Pantokrator, Mekone/Phlegra's spell Gigantomachia and I believe one or two nations' specific bonuses, can improve the odds in your favour.  Now who else is around... ah, yes, a few familiar faces that have woken up as well.  And the throne setup is what's probably the most standard one, someone will have to take seven thrones. There are no 1-pointers or 3-pointers. The 1-pointers aren't particularly interesting, they tend to be defended much like the 2-point thrones for the most part, but the 3-point thrones almost always have the same chassis' as pretender gods are made from guarding them, along with extremely nasty troops, and their effects are a bigger deal. The aforementioned Throne of the Pantokrator, for instance, boosts your chances of winning dominion spread contests and also counts as a massive additional seven spread chances per turn.  The map is also notably smaller this time around, in most SA Dom 5 games the map loops north-south and east-west, and here we can already see the north-south loop at the far top and bottom of the screen. We're almost certain to encounter new and exciting friends much sooner than last time.  And as an interesting side-note, here's our starting gem gen from our home province. An even spread, which is nice, and a single free blood slave per turn, which will ultimately amount to basically nothing in the long run. With the simple Turn 1 out of the way, let's have a slightly closer look at LA Mictlan.  These three base mages are the same as in EA and MA, though in EA the Sun priests are B3 and H3, and in MA the Nature mages(Priest Kings) are H3. We also lose MA's Sky Priests and Couatls, so we no longer have any Air access whatsoever. Our Rain Priests, not pictured, are now also amphibious frog people. All of them having Blood also means that we can make a Sabbat(like a Communion, but messier) to chain them together and if we get really pissed we could Sabbat up a bunch of Mictlan Priests(B1/H1 recruits that are LA Mictlan's best value-for-money in terms of research) and cast Hell Power and drown the battlefield in horrors.  Our anywhere-sacreds are, like in EA, back to being Jaguar Warriors, which is a bit of a downgrade from the Eagle Warriors, but still not bad. Eagle Warriors are once again cap-onlies, and Rain Warriors are our new cap-only option. They're the hardest-hitting of our sacreds at base, doing 21 damage compared ot the 18 for the Jaguar Warrior's obsidian club sword, and actually wear armor! It's not exceptionally heavy armor, and Jaguar Warriors have more fundamental survival because of their second form, in my mind, but they add a bit of variety to the proceedings. Being amphibious, on a map with more water, and if we had an actual coastline, a pack of them and an amphibious leader could get us secure underneath the waves and producing our store brand Atlanteans.  These three are our truly new options, Kings of Rain are our H3B3W3 slow-to-recruit cap-onlies. They're really beefy and strong for mages, making them reasonably resistant to low-effort attempts at assassination and likely to survive remote attack spells. Priests and Mothers of All Waters are our underwater mage options, since obviously our human priests and mages wouldn't be recruitable there. Water isn't the strongest path(in my opinion, I'm sure someone will disagree), but it's very easy to get +2(Water Bracelet, Robe of the Sea) and have W5 casters on tap, compared to paths like Fire, Earth and Air which are either pains in the rear end to make boosters for or require specific crosspaths for half their boosters. This means we can belt out Murdering Winter against cold provinces full of non-cold-resistant troops(pretty unlikely, but you never know when it might crop up) and have access to both Falling Frost and Cleansing Water, the former of which hits pretty hard(especially since cold resistance is more rare than fire and shock resistance) and the latter of which vaporizes undead and demons like no one's business. It'll also give us access to the Queens of Elemental Water at Conjuration 8, if we survive that long and no one beats us to them, and casters who can hurl out Living Water in battles, and hordes of angry elementals is always a useful strat. Let's see if anyone else comes up with as amazing a prophet name as I did.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2020 19:26
|
|
|
Mictlan Turn 02  The best part of any goon game, turn 2, where we get all of the prophet names.            I get a sense that Utgard might be harboring some sort of mild grudge against Agartha, and I have to respect Erytheia's god/prophet combo because I've done that exact same one in at least one previous game.  We also get our first look at our surroundings and... hmmm... yeah, alright, those are some big stacks of indies already, NW is the only one that looks particularly fragile. I believe I mentioned it before, but one of LA Mictlan's issues is that while indie strengths have buffed since EA and MA, Mictlan's basic troops have just... not. On the bright side, once we get rolling, we'll be more likely to find multiple 10k pop provinces for forts and blood hunting, while in the EA we were lucky to find even one, and in MA they were still a rare treat. Also a big fat pack of barbs to our east. Now, most nations would at this point have had their dominion splash out of their cap a bit, too, bringing the advantage of knowing more about their neighbouring provs. A few nations, I believe only the Arcos, get way more info out of nations provs their dom is on, essentially the same as having a scout or spy there, but all nations get at least some basic province info from it, like income, pop and resources, which are very useful for deciding where to expand. We, on the other hand, just get extremely basic info. We also have our first priest on the line. Mictlan Priests are H1B1 at all times and have a 10% chance of an additional Fire, Water, Nature or Astral magic. Money-wise, they're also marginally better value than Nahuallis for research, being 65 gold for 7(or 8, because of our Magic 1) vs 125 gold for 11(or, again, 12). A Nahualli is slightly above 10 gold per RP, while a Mictlan Priest is slightly below that. Plus the more small researchers we have, the better our Magic scale will pay for itself.      Fighting 80 barbs is just right out, 20 or 40 mixed light/heavy inf and militia sounds like a more reasonable fight, and I don't want to mess with the two larger provinces packing crossbowmen just yet. I know some people like to gamble with their first couple of turns, but in my experience if you gently caress up your first expand it can really delay you, while even just another 50 gold from a low-risk early expansion, as well as not losing too much of your initial expansion squad, can snowball into a decent advantage in the first ten or so turns. I ultimately decide to go for the province to my northwest, since that's clearly the most fragile, and since the post is otherwise somewhat short, let's look at a bit more of LA Mictlan's fun aspects.  On the Conjuration side of things, reasonably far up the scale, they get four unique summons at Conjuration 7 and also Couatls. Oddly enough they're worse than MA Mictlan's recruitable couatls since they have no chance of Air, making them less flexible and able to leverage their astral for communion casting into fun stuff. I'm not really sure if they're worth 40 nature gems a piece, honestly, that's almost casting Wild Hunt and we know Herne is good value for gems. The Tlaloques on the other hand, cost 60 water gems each, and I've ranted on about how great it is to have Blood 3 and upwards since it spares you some expensive empowering, and since they've got body slots, they're just an armor of thorns and a blood dagger from being Blood 5 and able to do fun stuff like spamming Infernal Disease, solid blood hunters, varied paths, Holy 3 and Death 2(which Mictlan otherwise has no real access to, so it's a nice bit of variety) make them something I hope to be able to summon eventually.  On the Blood side of things I'm really not sold on Civateteos, 50 blood slaves I can use for better things than a D1B1 caster Tlahuelpuchis are more interesting, having better paths and being flying assassins. I'd probably want to give them a bit of gear before using them for that, but their alright base stats means that some body armor and a weapon upgrade is about all they'd need. On the other hand, for only another 6 blood slaves(66 vs 60), I'd be able to summon a Succubus who's fundamentally a much tougher chassis(about twice the hit points), Invisible(unless you got Spirit Vision, good luck fighting her or patrolling her out, ever) and can attempt Dream Seductions(which have a tendency to turn into messy assassinations). Onaqui, on the other hand, have my complete attention. At 101 blood slaves they're somewhat expensive, but they come with a free value pack of Beast Bats(about 45 blood slaves' worth) and constantly summon more, additionally they're very good blood hunters, starting out equal to a Blood 5 because of their + Blood Searcher attribute, guaranteed to have +1 random to Fire, Death, Nature or Blood, flying, buff, fully equippable except for the body slot(which does hurt a bit for blood mages, but I'll live). They're a prime research goal, having in my mind no actual downsides.  Aside from that, Mictlan also has some misc. summons, which have some overlap with C'tis and Xibalba, and most novelly, they're all Sacred. Jaguars are basically summoned Jaguar Warriors, at 17 per 25 nature gems, a good bless can make them very scary. I've never bothered summoning the toads before, but Monster Toads are very tanky, maybe even worth hitting with Gift of Reason and using as a chassis(though they'd have terrible slots), but their poison cloud carries a large risk of friendly fire. At 2 nature gems each they're actually reasonably cheap, but expensive in mage turns since you only get one per casting. Could be worth leaving a Nahualli to spam those at some point, assuming the nature gem surplus. Jade Serpents I'm a huge fan of, extremely beefy, cost water gems which you don't have much other use for, for a lot of the game, sacred like the rest of them and their poison is actually powerful enough to get through poison resistances, since I don't think any unit has more than 25 or 30 poison resistance base. In Newbad2 I managed to poison one of Arcvasti's golems to death with one, so there you go, toxic enough to melt clay. Beast Bats are... situational. If their paralyzing poison takes effect, heck yeah, dead enemy. On the other hand, it's an on damage effect, on a 10 damage AP attack, which means a lot of armored enemies might shrug it off. Powerful nasty against mages, however. The way I read it, it should only do fatigue damage, but mages already have plenty of that from just casting spells, usually. Onaqui are the big nasty summon Mictlan gets, being literally flying super-jaguars. Expensive to summon, but very nasty once they're on the field. This access to summonable sacred fliers is part of what makes Mictlan scary, along with their Eagle Warriors, since having to plan for Attack Rear orders can upset strategies and cause grievous losses for anyone who didn't plan for it, and if you get the Eagle Warriors massed early, they usually make mulch of most indie formations. I forgot to screenshot their last option, but Tzizimitl are basically Ozelotls+, even having the same summoning cost despite being better in basically every way. The balancing part is that they're summoned one at a time and thus can be expensive in Moon Priest turns(they require S2B2 to summon) if you want to mass a decent number of them. They get an armor-negating(WITHOUT MR to resist) ranged attack, claws like the jaguar and a scorpion tail with poison like a Jade Serpent. Being humanoid, the pro strat might be to summon one, Gift of Reason it, and thug it up a bit so it can really do damage on the back lines. If I get the chance, I'll definitely consider playing around with that.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 18, 2020 06:35
|
|
|
Mictlan Turn 03  First fight of the game! Woo!  ...man I miss my MA Mictlan blessed-up Eagle Warriors already. That's close to half of my starting troops wiped out. I didn't screenshot it, but on turn 1 I started out recruiting some Jaguar Warriors because without a solid defensive bless or the numbers/offense bless advantage needed to one-shot the enemy and really mob their commanders off the field instantly, Eagle Warriors were gonna be turned into KFC in most cases. The Jags were more sturdy thanks to their woundedform. The Feathered Warriors is just a banner carrier sort of dude that ups morale for his squad by +1, I like to mix a few into most squads when able, just to stave off routs by that much more.  And my expanders are gonna be pulling back to restock on dudes, I wouldn't do this with all nations, but these guys are fragile enough for it. Like I think I've said before, getting your first expansion team obliterated can really set you back, so I greatly prefer to be cautious.  I also start plotting out my research. Generally I try to get everything but Blood(except, of course, with blood nations) up to rank 2, and with Nature-strong nations like Mictlan, Conjuration 5 is also an early priority because Howl is how you win fights. Construction 4 is another vital secondary goal to unlock a lot of important boosters and gear(like Sanguine Dowsing Rods).  Dominion's also started spreading because my first priest, rather than researching, is busy chopping up commoners. Priests with more ranks of Holy can do more sacrificing, but my better priests all have better things to do since they're also my best mages, instead each temple is gonna get a novice who'll eventually get equipped, as soon as I hit Construction 2, with one of Mictlan's unique national Jade Daggers, which allows him to sacrifice two more slaves than his priest rank would normally indicate. That'll mean that most of my temples will be squeezing out three temple checks per turn, staving off the horrors of getting domkilled. Oh and, uh, look who's already here, it's TC! Hi TC. LA TC can be plenty scary, but thankfully I'm convinced that we'll be best of friends since I've turned over a new leaf and am no longer going to be plotting and scheming against anyone at all. 
|
|
#
¿
Jan 19, 2020 22:42
|
|
|
Alex0080 posted:
I have to admit, I personally almost never recruit mercenaries, because I find it hard to think of a nation where I don't have something better to spend my gold on, another bunch of sacreds that can expand for more than two turns and won't be loving Urgek Beast Brother, or another mage, or a bunch of my normal troops which are almost always better than whatever mercs are up for grabs. Alex0080 posted:
Firstly, I see that filename. Secondly, at this point I'm only going to backstab you if it becomes expedient for whatever reason. It's not like I'm somehow compelled to engage in as much pointless treachery as possible.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 19, 2020 23:55
|
|
|
CommissarMega posted:Militiaman pretender god chassis when? "Having become province defense, there is nothing left to aspire to but Godhood." Akratic Method posted:What do drain scales do? And if it's great that these guys aren't affected by them, it seems like it would be commensurately bad that your other mages are, so why isn't that a problem? Generally Drain scales make you lose the game, really, because they set you back in terms of research. Of course, it varies a lot per nation how bad it is. For instance, Mictlan relying mostly on many small researchers with Drain 3 may as well go home and think about their life. Niefelheim that has fewer, bigger, researching ladies, it might not hurt as badly. And some nations, like MA Ulm and LA Man have explicitly nothing but drain-resisting researchers, so for them it's a very obvious pick.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 20, 2020 10:46
|
|
|
Mictlan Turn 04    Turn 4 is pretty uneventful, I get myself a big ol' water boy to do some researching with, and I get lucky enough on his rolls to get him to Water 4 as well. It's not really one of my favourite schools, but if nothing else it can be used to summon both some cool things on its own(never underestimate Sea Troll Kings) and the combo with blood provides access to some frosty nasty summons. Plus he's holy 3 for leading sacreds and he'll be able to buff himself up to Water 6 with some cheap boosters that he can craft himself before too long. I also wonder what's up with Jomon waiting this late to make himself a prophet.  I also decide to head back north for expanding, both because it's one of my least-guarded neighbouring provinces and because with TC up that way, I don't want him grabbing all that fat, juicy territory. Turn 05   Now this went a lot better than last time. While I still technically lost about a third of my losers, that entire third was just non-sacred wasteoids that I literally couldn't care less about. I also mixed a few Rain Warriors into my party mix, because I realized their armor might help them survive at least a little bit, and also I was curious about how they'd do. About as well as my Jaguar Warriors, I guess?   I start producing Mictlan Priests for research fodder, and since the first province I grabbed actually had okay income(almost everything in the Late Age does, honestly), I recruited an indie commander there to slap up a fort and get my income boosts started. My scout, meanwhile, tours TC territory, and I see that farm province really weakly defended and decide to pounce on it. TC might have bounced off it, or perhaps it's just a random roll of the dice, or maybe it actually contains 80 crossbowmen or something.  Or, well, I guess the max is 40(your scouting reports can vary from 50% to 200% of the true values, for the most part).
|
|
#
¿
Jan 20, 2020 22:31
|
|
|
Mictlan Turn 06   Predictably, our one battle of the turn goes well. I'd later find out that it was because T'ien C'hi had bounced off it to my north, and he wasn't entirely pleased about me sniping it after he'd failed to take it.  Generally a good estimate for your early expansion is that your amount of provinces, up to and including Turn 12, should never be less than turn counter -1, and if you've got an awake expander, more than that, since you should have two expanding groups. Usually around turn 12, with most games, you'll start bumping into your neighbours and that'll constrict your expansion some. At four territories, we're slightly behind the curve because we stepped back to reinforce. I'm hoping to get another expansion party up and running before turn 12 so I won't be left too behind, but LA Mictlan isn't an easy nation to expand as since your sacreds are mildly obsolete and, uh, my EXTREMELY WISE bless choices haven't helped much either.  The capital is pooping out priests and this next province looks like a soft target. The one to the northeast contains indie onis who are rare enough that I don't recall how much trouble they are, if I remember right they turn into ghosts after being killed which then either need annoying killing(being ethereal) or banishing. A forest province also has better chance of having decent income than a mountain province.  I also make a mental note that this throne seems remarkably lightly defended. No weird defenders, no unusual mages noted in the overview.  And I get an early start on a bit of blood hunting. Now, I don't quite understand the blood hunting maths perfectly, it seems very variable in payoff, but as I've since learned, Blood 1's aren't something you should be hunting with unless you're desperate or they have Sanguine Dowsing Rods. Blood 2 and upwards seem to be where the real payoff is, and a fat cluster of Blood 2's(or Blood 1's with dowsing rods) seem to have a better payoff rate than smaller numbers of higher-ranked blood hunters(who you'll usually have better uses for in any case). Still, gonna need those blood slaves, gotta get hunting. I've also intentionally de-prioritized claiming my cap circle, since it's my experience that a lot of players won't try to steal yours unless it's extremely obvious they can beat you, since expanding into someone else's cap circle is more or less an implicit declaration of war, when it happens it's usually an accident and the other guy will back off, unless he's supremely confident he can kick your rear end, and if he's that confident he would've probably just stomped your PD to take your cap circle anyway. If TC isn't aggressive enough to do that and I can snag just a province or two more to the northeast, I can cut off his eastwards expansion(unless he goes north of the lake, but probably there's someone else up there.). Turn 07  Yeah, a single B1 hunter is just gonna bounce off his blood hunting most turns.  Construction 2 yields little of great note... for most nations. For Mictlan it's an important milestone since it lets them make Jade Knives that ups their blood saccers to being able to sacrifice two more victims per turn. Which means that my Holy1 priests can now carve up three slaves in a turn if I hand them one of these. That'll do a lot to reclaim my lost lead on dominion expansion. Otherwise it's mostly low grade gear, most of it not strictly bad, but somewhat eclipsed by Construction 4 and 6 where you get boosters and the real fun stuff.  One sacred and a generic goon for murdering 25 indies? That's a pretty fair exchange. Keep that up and these guys can expand for a good while yet without resupply.  TC shows up on my border but greatly vows that he's totally not planning to fight me. Usually people don't outright lie to you, they waffle and make vague statements, plain lying is bad manners, but if you betray someone while not explicitly having said you won't, you're in the clear!  My scout also discovers a Well of Pestilence(or Leper Valley, or other disease-causing site) in his cap circle the hard way. I offer to tell him where it is, but he somehow with stands my extremely solid pitch.  I also get to work on a fort to the NW of my capital. It's a bit late, but Mictlan has real expensive forts, at 750 gold as opposed to the normal 600 gold, it means they're easily left a bit behind in fort expansion in any of the three ages. My personal rule of thumb on forts is that I want my second fort built before Turn 12 at the very least, otherwise I may as well just resign myself to being a useless rump state, and ideally much earlier than that.  And I decide to take a shot at knocking over those oni on the mountain, cutting off TC would be real good, since if he encircles me, I'll be in trouble.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 23, 2020 13:42
|
|
|
Yeah, the monkey nations have some decent archers. If someone doesn't Air Shield them into irrelevance, they can really gently caress you up, I've learned.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 23, 2020 20:52
|
|
|
Khisanth Magus posted:And here we have Mictlan, who I don't think I need to say anything else about being next to Mictlan! I'm glad that you respect me as a neighbour and look forward to a fruitful and cooperative friendship. Khisanth Magus posted:I will also explain my early research goals. Unless I am playing a nation that can get some good early battle magic I usually spend the first part of the game researching all the remote site searching spells for the paths I have available. They cost gems to cast, but I don't have to worry about remembering to shuffle mages around and searching each time, and also you can search faster this way since you don't have a 2 turn or more process for each province. Also no worries about potentially missing a site due to not having sufficient levels in the path. This used to be my process as well, but it ended up depending a lot on the age and nation. In the early age you usually have more "pure" path mages, and I end up using site-searching spells rather than shuffling around a big corps of them, in the middle and late ages, you usually have more "mixed" path mages where one mage can search for two, three or sometimes even four paths at once, and just having up to 2 points in a path generally uncovers something like 70% of all the sites they possibly could, so with a lot of nations it ends up saving you a big bucket of gems in the end to just do the site-searching manually, at least at first, just to get the gem income started up properly.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2020 04:55
|
|
|
Mictlan Turn 08   It's pretty impressive that a goddamn B1 managed to haul 5 blood slaves out of a province by himself. Blood hunting can be real swingy.   Aaaaaaaaand we have our first setback. We whomped most of them, but they did way more damage than I had expected or hoped. I'm actually not quite sure what lost me the battle, I think it might just have been unlucky rolls, or maybe my non-sacreds got flattened and it got the rest of them to start running for it because it accounted for enough of the total HP of the army/squad.  However, this screenshot shows something wrong. I could fall back for more troops, but then it's almost guaranteed that TC would snag that mountain away from me and then have a way around me in the meantime. On the other hand, I've got like, four sacreds left, I could crash them and my prophet into the mountain and hope for the best and lock out TC... so that's what I end up trying to do. Mictlan Turn 09   Conjuration 2 isn't super relevant for most nations, for a few nations it has some early national summons(for instance the *Rus nations), but otherwise it's mostly notable for having Storm Power and Water Power, which are +1 Air and Water paths if there's a storm up or you're in water. The latter's gonna be used liberally by most UW nations and Storm/Storm Power is an integral part of playing EA or MA Caelum properly, it's kind of your national thing. So about that battle...  No lie, waiting for that battle report to come in was a real butt clencher, because if I had miscalculated that one I would've been out a prophet and, as mentioned, TC would likely have enveloped me.  I spot Pythium to the northeast, but I'm not too worried. That doesn't really look like an invasion force. Considering my Rain Warriors I may also actually be one of the nations with a fair shot at that lake throne, assuming nothing else fucks me up hardcore.  Of course, had I known about his HYDRA HELLBLESS, I would've probably been a bit more worried about this. Funnily enough at this point he probably could have owned me with just that, since I'm off to SUCH a fragile start. You may also be wondering about that straggler Mictlan Priest up there on the TC/Mictlan border, he's gonna fort that province the heck up. Another fun thing about Mictlan? When everyone gets castles in MA and Citadels in LA, Mictlan still only gets fortresses. On the one hand this is another economic malus, since it limits their maximum admin boos, and then just for a slap with the other hand, it also prevents you from getting as many commander points as everyone else will be raking in. I'm slowly realizing that I might be slightly boned this game.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2020 23:58
|
|
|
How are u posted:LA Jomon can project some serious power underwater. They're one of my favorite nations in concept but have a few real flaws that keep them from competing with the best nations of the Age. I'm so sad that it isn't easier to make a sick-rear end Shramp & Crab battle army. Arcvasti posted:Living the imprisoned double incarnate life. However, Mictlan, and in particular with my bless, is great for the strategy I call "become a rump state that endlessly mires someone in war and causes them absurdly disproportionate losses when they invade you, resulting in their eventual destruction because everyone else didn't waste resources fighting you." If it ain't a spite strat, it ain't a GREAT strat. PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 10:12 on Jan 26, 2020 |
|
#
¿
Jan 26, 2020 10:09
|
|
|
The_Final_Stand posted:Isn't this exact strategy why no one likes Ermor, Rl'yeh etc. ? Nah, the thing about Ermor is that if they reach critical mass, they become essentially uninvadable by any nation that isn't able to field a big undead/uneating force or a lot of nature mages to provide supply(either by being present, with items, or both) since their dom aggressively depopulates territory, which also strips away supply. On top of that, this also makes their territory extremely unprofitable even once they're cleared out. Now, my territory is actually pretty great, tons of gold income even if nothing else, but for a lot of nations I'm gonna be hard to attack without notable losses.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 26, 2020 21:22
|
|
|
Lord Koth posted:MA Ermor and LA Lemuria are basically in a world of their own in regards to how hated they are. Purple touched on it, but basically it boils down to one player completely sacrificing their game to eliminate them (if they even can), because their popkill domains are so vicious that any province that enters their dominion is going to be worth precisely jack poo poo in terms of gold and population in short order. So even if you are capable of reasonably invading them by one mentioned method or another, you're just losing resources via attrition and gaining basically nothing in return. We did this in Fermanagh, made a big ol' "gently caress GHOSTS"-coalition and dunked on Lemuria. Meanwhile, in Eels, which I somehow won, Atelier here got ignored for most of the game, so by the end of it I think a good quarter of the world map was just blighted Lemuria provinces and I only won because the Cataclysm treated me right. Had it been a stand-up fight for longer, I would've been crushed by waves of ghosts. It was pure luck on my part that Atelier didn't get aggressive with me until I put up Purgatory when her armies started looking real spooky and in need of bustin'. I think Purgatory ended up getting dispelled like three times, though, and it loses some of its effectiveness when the ghosts have like fifty forted provinces all with temples and their dominion is real eager to skwoosh over on to you. I think it's a shame, though, like, if the game had some sort of spell for "repopulating" a province, i.e. a "RESTORE THE BALANCE" spell that adds a couple thousand pop to a province that's not a wasteland and is under 2000 or something, and/or if the Ermor/Lemuria expansion was kind of like the Necromancer event, where their growth produced valuable gem sites, then fighting them might make more sense, since suddenly there's a reward to equal the effort. Like instead of getting gold income provinces from fighting them, you'll get an incomparably rich gem income zone.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2020 10:56
|
|
|
GunnerJ posted:The Roman god of the underworld is also the god of hidden riches so it's not even thematically inappropriate. Like, okay, check this concept. Ermor currently gets +1Death Gem per temple. How about instead of that, they had relatively common events where a province in their Dom for long enough would get 1 or more +Death or +Astral gem sites. Suddenly those provinces have the same advantage to Ermor that they also had, but other nations would start looking hungrily at them as a rich source of gem income. Or perhaps base it on the presence of their Bishops of Eldregate or something. It would A) make them more rewarding to conquer and B) force them to shuffle some of their fragile high-cost goons out there to generate sites, giving them some high-value targets that other players could attempt to strike at. But that's just My Thoughts On Videogames.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2020 14:46
|
|
|
Mictlan Turn 10   As my galaxy brain predicted, we're gonna have a stable and narrow border with Pythium. Narrow borders are the best kind of borders for Mictlan since everything we control is sooooooooo slooooooooooow. No cavalry and really only one option for a flying commander, ever. Even Ulm could probably outpace us in most scenarios.  And I make a declaration of love and peace for everyone in the game. It'll either get me instantly dogpiled or left alone. Let's see! A random event drops the temperature in Dunheim, relatively irrelevant, and I forget to screenshot what the global event was. It may have been an arena announcement.   I get grabbing on that province to my west just in case TC decides to be rude enough to move on my cap circle, and shuttle a few blood slaves up north for sacrificing until I can get a lab up. Much like gems, blood slaves require labs to teleport them around instantly, otherwise you get to be hassled by a large amount of tedious rock-and-slave shuffling which I do not have the patience for. This also means our entire western border is gonna be with TC, because there's a river in the way to the west and once my Heat 3 dominion gets over there, that's never not gonna be thawed. The scout that's been out and about has found that Patala's off to our west, beyond the river, so technically his snakey dudes could, I think, actually cross it. Turn 11  There we go, it was the arena. Generally participating in the arena is only worth it for nations that have beefy humanoid options, like the giant nations or nations at the stage where they can summon nasty humanoid goons like Tartarians. See, the arena itself consists of 1-on-1 battles, so anyone not beefy is liable to get knocked over in round one unless he can spam elementals or something to protect himself(having a Bottle of Living Water along will trivialize most early arena fights). Mages aren't necessarily bad contenders, but the reward is ultimately always a piece of thuggy gear. Armor, weapons, boots, etc. that help make the winner better at fighting and not dying. None of it that I've seen really has any utility for a mage, but is universally amazing on a thug or, better yet, an assassin. There's a decent selection of non-humanoid thugs, but if you toss one of them in there you might get some gear they don't have the slots for.  A pretty trivial fight, I wish the rest of them had gone quite as easily.   Out of respect for tradition, and just on the off chance that Dominions' exploding dice comes to their rescue, most people will send a spare scout or commander off to die in the arena if they have one. The result even if they win won't be much good, but at least it'll deny someone else the win.    As seen here, by all rights Agartha's Lava-Born Commander was probably the strongest contender, but either TC had some real lucky rolls, or Agartha's arena champion had his arms and legs lopped off in the preceding stages and carried those injuries with him to the finishing line.   And of course Erytheia's arena champion gets a pokey stick for his troubles which is a real nice weapon, but he's not exactly the sort of beefy warrior that can chow through entire squads on his own with it.     So, we've got TC NW, Pythium NE, Patala straight W and now Pangaea to the east, and pretty close to my borders, too. I'm pretty sure that unless I manage to pull something genius, I've gotten hopelessly behind on my expansion. Probably my biggest flaw there was that A) I forgot how much tougher LA indies were and should've gone for less incarnate blessing or an awake expander to help me out in the early game and B) I should have recruited a lump of mercenaries or two if I could've won the bid on any of them. All isn't lost, a bad start can still turn good if you can identify the right opportunities to expand. For instance, when an opponent is hopelessly mired in a war... I immediately start casually asking everyone I border whether they just so happen to be getting into any fights yet. Hopefully one of them will be foolish enough to answer honestly when they are!
|
|
#
¿
Jan 28, 2020 19:43
|
|
|
Honestly, I actually had no idea you'd weakened that province when I first came across it, I was just like "oh boy, free real estate!  "You could've probably kept me off it by saber-rattling hard enough.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 29, 2020 01:36
|
|
|
Mictlan Turn 12  I really can't wait to get a decent blood hunting team online, but in my experience as Mictlan that usually takes until Const 4 where you can make Sanguine Dowsing Rods. Anything you have that's natively Blood 2 is limited to your capital, so relying on them rather than just juicing up your Mictlan Priests with SDR's is gonna take a while.  At least Gintmark is brought into the fold in a flawless victory. Probably would have gone differently if it had been one of those provinces with cavalry, though.   Events are... good!  Right now my priority is to take as much of my eventual border with Utgard and Pan as possible, to prevent them hemming me in too hard. I have a feeling like that's probably not going to go too well, though, and that I'm going to have to look for opportunities to create a breakout or, perhaps, create my own opportunities. Sadly all that's left involves beating up big barbarian mobs, more or less.  With my first two forts up, I want them templed, labbed and vomiting out priests and sacreds as soon as possible. They're already providing a nice economic boost, but look at how fragile my dominion is, I barely have dom on half my territory! Turn 13   Acceptable losses for expanding my territory. At least in the Late Age, I'm less reliant on a small number of high-pop provinces for blood hunting, almost every province is a valid target for scraping up some virgins and tossing them into the blender.  God, it feels like everyone's had a better expansion than me this game.  Poor maneuvering has left my expanders stopped by a river, and they need to fall back a province to find a bridge, but at least that lets me reinforce them with a few more sacred losers. May as well hedge my bets considering that it's gonna be a fight against barbs.  Slightly better zoom for viewing the surrounding area. At this point if I'm going to be expand it'll definitely be up against the Pan border. On the bright side, my economy is going well and I can afford a new fort or lab/temple combo every turn for the foreseeable future, and with any luck no one will think to be aggressive against me until I've got a healthy blood economy and some awful blood spells up and running. Unfortunately two of my neighbours are going to be resistant to some of the cheaper Blood shots, both Pan and Utgard primarily have commanders that would be tough enough to go to smack town on a Disease Demon. I also start realizing that in my hurry to fort, lab, temple and everything else that gives a functioning gold/blood economy down the line, I've thoroughly neglected to send any real mages out site-searching and resolve to do this as soon as possible. Honestly it's something I should've done five or six turns ago, if not before. Every site I could've found ten turns ago is a site that could've been producing gems for that long. On the other hand, this being the Late Age, in my territory there's probably like... two sites, maybe, to find?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 4, 2020 23:57
|
|
|
Goddamn, I knew Gath was doing well this game, but I had no idea you were doing that well. Though it doesn't really surprise me, having played Gath, a fun-size pack of Gibbors and a few backup giants can whomp most indies without too much trouble.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2020 20:52
|
|
|
I still can't get over the fact that everyone but Mictlan gets a troop upgrade for LA.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2020 02:35
|
|
|
Lord Koth posted:As a note here, there are definitely different insanity result tables (or else different weighting of the options based on some factor). I don't know if it's as simple as the difference between Insanity and Shattered Soul, but most insane units will almost always do something useless (but harmless) when they trigger the chance, as opposed to a few that will trigger a harmful effect (destroy something, pillage the province, etc.) the majority of the time. Not going to say for certain that normal human insanity can't result in a lab burning, but it's a rather rare chance at best - hell, LA R'yleh would not really function at all if there was a relatively appreciable chance of a destructive event happening. Personally I was always disappointed that the "build a mausoleum" insanity/shattered mind order didn't actually produce a novel site.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2020 03:15
|
|
|
Ramc posted:TC gets the better horsemen but a lot of their vanilla line troops do not change from EA to MA to LA I'm sorry Ramc I can't hear you over my threadbare excuse for why I suck at this game.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2020 12:46
|
|
|
Mictlan A three-turner this time around, not because the game pace has suddenly accelerated, but because someone asked for turns 17 and 18 to be in a combined post, and at this stage of the game single-turn posts tend to be relatively short on content. So y'all get a triple. Turn 14    Turn 14 is a bit quiet, someone claims a throne, it's Bureaucracy. As mentioned it's mostly good for spreading your dominion around, so very nice for nations that rely on specific dominion effects(like the popkill nations and MA C'tis), if you have any dominion-based globals up(Dark Skies, Purgatory, etc.) or if you want to push back those effects. The +1 Order scale to your dominion in general can also amount to considerable economic boost if you've got a less than +3 Order already, and it'll help fend off negative events if you're one of the foooooooooooooools who went for negative Luck scales without also going +3 Order already to avoid drowning in bad things. Oh and we also found a fun site that could be vital to the future of Mictlan if I end up getting to a point where I can really utilize it.  It provides a 10% discount on blood slaves spent any time a blood ritual is cast in the province. Early on it won't amount to much, but later on when rituals start costing 60+ slaves(succubi, onaqui, blood globals, etc.) it easily starts adding up to major savings. Of course this also relies on me surviving and researching for long enough to be able to really leverage that. Considering that people are by default somewhat twitchy about Blood nations, it's probably a good idea not to tell anyone I've got this.   My hope is that I can score that throne before Pangaea can, I feel like it's going to be pretty decisive for my future success. Also that's Utgard's big boys south of me, snagging a province I had dreams of grabbing faster than I could. Let's hope they don't follow north, they probably won't, it'd be pretty early for anyone to start up any hostilities against another nation. Turn 15   The main relevant thing for this turn was bonking those barbarians. Check out those sweet kill counts for my sacreds.  Flush with victory and judging the throne lightly guarded, I decide to send my goons on to smash it. It should go pretty easily, I figure.  Of course there's SOME heavy cavalry but... how badly can it go? The only other thing of note that happens during Turn 15 is that I continue with the vital work of forting, templing and labbing as many provinces as I can, in the Late Age, it's almost harder finding provinces that aren't worth building up than provinces that are. Especially for a nation like Mictlan that doesn't give a drat about Resources due to not wearing armor. Everyone else mostly wants to leave gaps between their forts so they don't choke each other out and they can maximize production, but mostly what I want is to make sure I maximize income off all my provinces, production of sacreds and production of mages since everything I have is cheap, cheap, cheap. Turn 16  Two throne claims this turn, will we be the third?   The Throne of the First Age is a +1 Magic to the owner's dominion and a +1 MR to your bless, the Inner Throne is +1 Order and passive blood slave income. Shame that's not the one I'll be getting here, then. It's very minor blood slave income, but having some is always better than having none.   gently caress, this is literally worse than just getting beat the gently caress out, because I've now cleared the only thing that could keep Pan from snagging the throne. With luck, I might be able to mount a second attack before he notices how vulnerable it is, but there's a good chance he might have parked a scout on the throne and watched that fight. Both because it helps you keep tabs on who has what thrones(in case they don't instantly grab one, to keep their power level hidden for a lunge) and because it helps you vulture weakened-but-not-taken thrones or see if a competitor lost big on trying to take a throne and might be weakened himself as a target. Losing my H3 StR caster on the retreat is kind of just some poo poo icing on the crap cake here. I could tell Pan that I just took a shot at the throne and bounced and want to call dibs on it because I did most of the work, but if Pan is a clever cookie he'll take that as "ah, Mictlan is weak, time to tell him 'lol no' and take all his poo poo." On the other hand most people playing in the newbads, and in new games in general, tend to swing towards being trustworthy and embracing a sense of fair play. Suckers. I decide not to gamble it.  At least the soothing touch of Fortune 3 events make me feel good. Mmmmmmm. The gold events can get pretty absurd at times, essentially there are three tiers of +gold events at something like max 500, max 1000 and max 1500 depending on whether you're Luck 1, 2 or 3 but what's non-obvious is that they can apparently happen more than once to the same province, so I've seen mad results of up to +5000 gold at times. In this case I just got handed a free fort and temple, or fort and lab, or a couple of labs/temples and some savings. Very good stuff, it helps lessen the sting of the loss a bit. The random event in Mictlan was some dominion loss WHICH ABSOLUTELY IS NOT WHAT I NEED RIGHT NOW, GAME, THANK YOU.  Pulling my goons back to recover and re-arm, while shuffing some Tribal Kings around. Tribal Kings are pretty mediocre commanders, but can be buffed by your bless, can lead okay-sized numbers of mortal troops(80) and can collect slaves. Since you'll need to patrol down unrest from blood hunting anyway, two tribal kings in each blood hunting province is kind of a must, one of them to collect slaves and the other to patrol with slaves. Eventually graduating to both of them patrolling once they're maxed out on slaves. Mictlanian slave soldiers are spectacularly useless for any other purpose, but they're great for that one.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 8, 2020 08:07
|
|
|
So far things have been nice and peaceful, but we're about to get to the exciting parts. Does anyone remember the turn where The Bogarus Event happened? I forgot to note it down myself and neither Bogarus or Pythium, whom I remember as the two "participants" in that fun escapade are in the thread.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 9, 2020 07:19
|
|
|
Mictlan Turn 17    It's a good thing some events are gated by turn(I think all dom loss events require it to be turn 10 at the least), getting a dom loss event on turn 3 or 4 as non-MA Mictlan could kill you stone loving dead. Also not a bad event with a free lab, though it would have been better if it was in a fort province, it's likely that the nature gems will end up more valuable.  The only remaining neutral territory is the throne, any other expansion is going to require fighting someone, and I am not in a good shape for fighting anyone I border. I can't reach Patala, due to the drat river. TC has his horsemen. Utgard's boys are big. Pangaea has had some big-ish stacks along the borders... frankly Pythium may end up being the best of a series of bad choices, but I hold out hope of being able to resolve this by betraying someone. I just need one of my neighbours to get into a fight, and either I can backstab them or I can support them if their target is another neighbour and they appear to be winning. The only fighting I'm aware of is that round this point or a few turns in the future Patala and Agartha are embroiled. I become briefly excited until I remember that drat fun-ruining river, but keep my eyes and ears open to take advantage if at all possible.  Pan is probably going for the throne, but I cobble together a quick strike team against the throne just in case he's not. Or in case he's actually planning to invade me, that's also a worry. Turn 18   I'm starting to realize that I've made a research mistake, my first target should have been Const 4 and everything else should have been secondary, as it's becoming rapidly obvious how much of my blood economy is going to depend on getting Sanguine Dowsing Rods online. Still, Conjuration will be important eventually, for sacred Jaguars, Jade Serpents and eventually Howl as a vital battle spell.   Pan hasn't yet moved for the throne, so I take another turn to make sure I can take it this time, feeling relatively assured that I've got another turn or two, just to make sure I don't waste my troops. Turn 19   The Crystal Throne is a nice one, since it provides Earth/Astral mages that are both good for busting out Gifts and for forging Crystal Coins, an Astral +1 booster. Earth/Astral crosspaths are relatively rare among most nations, so it's a nice thing to be available to make, and a lot of nations that have Astral will be happy to add Earth to their repetoire and vice versa. This turn we also get some fun news, apparently Bogarus had an Irminsul(big immobile tree) PG that they launched into hostile territory with a Teleport spell to gently caress up the enemy and... completely lost it. This was apparently their main strat so now they're looking real vulnerable. Teleporting an immobile CAN be very powerful, but also very risky if they're highly dependant on their bless, but this early in the game I don't think I'd have risked it myself, and especially not an Irminsul. Firstly, at this stage you probably don't have any of the big kickass spells online they can abuse with their Innate Caster, and secondly Irminsuls are Nature mages. In my experience Nature mages once off-script LOVE to cast Panic rather than anything that actually physically harms the enemy. I had an immobile PG pull this on me once and render herself completely useless until a swarm of EA Ermorian Equites whittled her down to pebbles.  This then presents the first big clear upset since Bogarus' player, Biggsmore or less instantly throws up his hands and goes "welp, that was my big gamble, I'm hosed." If I'm not mistaken, his target was Pythium, which makes me sad. I would have loved to border a Pythium getting beaten up by a big tree, even though expansion in that direction would have turned me into a long, slinky nation that would be real hard to defend and real easy to partition.  Stealthy troops also aren't big friends of blood nations, since more or less every prov with a fort is eventually going to have hundreds of something or another patrolling away to keep blood hunting unrest down. I forgot to grab a look at the map at the end, but this turn Pangaea snagged the throne. On the one hand, shame I didn't attack, on the other hand, good thing I didn't attack, since unless he attacked first and only barely handled the indies, I would've just lost more troops when he bonked me off the throne, and right now I'm more or less just free forts for the taking and need to keep a low profile.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 14, 2020 09:25
|
|
|
I legitimately feel sorry for Biggs, he may be the unluckiest player in the SA Dom 5 community.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 15, 2020 05:09
|
|
|
Mictlan Turn 20   And so begins my diplomatic assault on the other nations. They'll LEARN to love me.    At least I'm partially winning over the RNG!  It's also time to crank out a few of these, they're one of Mictlan's unique items and basically required to avoid wasting actually competent mages on blood sacrificing, they'll allow my pittance of territories with temples to project dominion like I had 15 temples, by boosting their blood sacrifice ability to H-rank + 2 rather than just H-rank.  While I look for an opening or weakness among my neighbours to exploit, or an alliance to glom onto and/or betray, I send some mages out to get serious about site searching. With this being the Late Age, though, I don't have much hope for finding anything worth a drat. Turn 21   Well, that's off to a better start than I expected, i.e. finding anything at all.  Luck 3, baybee! The scouts getting mulched is why it's hard to scout blood nations, especially Mictlan. In any given province I'm blood hunting I'm liable to have between 100 and 200 slaves doing nothing but patrolling, and even though they're lame units, they'll eventually find just about any scout and crunch them up good.  Around this point, word is that Agartha and Patala are scrapping, and the mercenary buy-ins support that. If not for that goddamn river I could snipe a chunk out of Patala, but no such luck, and I don't border Agartha. Turn 22  My lovely B1 blood hunters are also starting to have the numbers required to occasionally rake in a decent number of blood slaves despite how much they suck at their jobs. This is pleasing. Obviously I am going to want far more blood slaves than this, but it's a start. I also hit Conjuration 3 in research, which is an "eh" level for most other nations but great for Mictlan because it's where you get to summon Jaguars, 25 Nature Gems gets you 17 sacreds with 1.5x the health of a normal human, two attacks and decent strength, with only the weakness of near-zero protection. If you have a decent bless, especially if it, say, involves Barkskin, Jaguars can be a very worthwhile summon especially since your generic H2N2B2 casters can cast it, so it's very feasible to whip up a force on the fly.  Aside from that, I expand my fortified provinces and upgrade some of my existing forts, for the economic benefits.  Then the actually interesting part of this set of turns crops up. The war with Patala takes a bad turn for Agartha, and Utgard, my southern neighbour, who borders him, starts preparing to take advantage of it. I promptly start preparing to backstab Utgard once he commits to the fight. He politely informs me when he's going to attack, too. Utgard also lets me know that TC is plotting to attack me, which I recognize as possibly being true because of all the barbarian horsemen he has on my border. Fighting a fair one-on-one war has never really been my style, though.  I politely convince TC that it's in his benefit to help me backstab Utgard. Diplomacy! Then I start wondering how I'm going to manage to pack backstabbing TC into this.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2020 19:45
|
|
|
I'm curious to have eyes on the Agartha/Patala war, mostly what we got was rumours about who was getting their rear end kicked.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2020 22:56
|
|
|
Being an honest and reliable alliance partner did very briefly cross my mind. But only briefly. Generally extorting people is more profitable than actually fighting them since you get stuff for free, so that's my usual MO.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 23, 2020 10:59
|
|
|
Mictlan Turn 23  Turn 23 is primarily a holding pattern turn, where I prepare for backstabbing TC after using him to help me backstab Utgard. It want to make sure that TC has committed to the attack first, so Utgard will believe my claims due to the groupings of TC forces, and also so that TC can't easily turn around and hit me instead when he eventually finds out about it. Ideally it'll take him long enough to find out that he actually goes and attacks Utgard himself, thus starting up the war proper, but since not everyone is as virtuous as me, I expect that Utgard will probably tell TC that I told him and then I'll have to fend off TC myself after having gained whatever I could extort from Utgard.    If I didn't already have a plot ready to ward off TC, I'd feel worried about these force assemblages. Because the very smart thing for TC to do would be to attack me, a struggling nation with Blood, before I become a booming nation with Blood. Pythium doesn't really have a wide enough border with me for me to be worried, if he comes for me, I'll have an easy time bringing him to a fight and I'm not terribly afraid of LA Pyth. MA Pyth is pretty scary because while their generic troops are supremely forgettable, they can very easily bring some super nasty communions to bear once you hit the midgame. LA Pyth hydras SHOULD be real scary? But for some reason they always seem to fall flat in every game I see them in. Pangaea would mostly spooky me if he attacked at the same time as Pythium, but I ask politely and he confirms he's not going to attack me, which is usually believable since while backstabbing is just part and parcel of Dominions, outright lies are very rare.  ]More reports from the Patala/Agarthan war do not seem good for Agartha, which surprises me, since everyone talks down LA Patala and my own experiences with LA Agartha is that their sacred Blindfighters very easily become sacred Blenders. Still, maybe Lotham is just the chosen one who commands the monkeys well. He should have the practice by now, anyway. Turn 24  There's a bit more happening on Turn 24.  The Silver Throne is one of my favourite thrones, because it gives you a notable income boost, and lets you recruit A2S2 casters. More S casters is always great in case there are a bunch of mind hunting fuckers around, Air is a great combat path, and if your nation doesn't have good native access to those two paths, it's more path variety. It also doesn't unleash any lovely events on the world, which is a nice bonus.   The events are... less than good. Two random indie attacks.  Thankfully one happens in the province I just moved some commanders to, to build a new fort-temple-lab combo.  And the other got chunked by unsupported PD on account of just being angry dogs. Turn 25  Aside from what happens in-game, Turn 25 is also the turn where I tell Utgard what's coming and how he can avoid my wrath. He seems a bit reluctant, and since I don't want him telling on me to TC and having both of them turn on me, I settle for a lighter settlement than I originally wanted. I'm just going to be getting one province and 20 Water gems, but a province and gems all for the price of some words? That's a bargain. The main sticking point was that our border is at this point three of his provinces: A lake I can't easily take, a fort and a non-fort. And he wasn't willing to budge on the fort, and taking one more province would leave him with a vulnerable and untenable salient or exclave.  The Iron Throne is like a worse version of the Silver Throne, 100 Resources rather than 100 Income generated, and it makes E2S2 mages instead. Though that does open up the vast comedy of spamming Gifts From Heaven, which is clearly one of the best spells in Dominions.  Turn 26  Really, the biggest lesson I've learned from repeatedly getting paid off not to attack people is that you should never accept blackmail unless you're in a multi-front war and need to limit the amount of fronts you're fighting on, or you're a few turns off from a really nasty advantage(due to research, forging, etc.). Instead, your response to attempted blackmail should almost always be, no matter how untenable it seems: "Fine, we're at war now." Because if you're at an apparent disadvantage now, you'll be at even more of a disadvantage 10 turns down the line with him having paid no resources to secure two or three of your provinces.   The Throne of Knowledge is another good one. It has no passive effects beyond the usual throne dominion spread, but it lets you recruit Lore Masters and Sages. Sages are EXTREMELY cheap old wizards, something like 10 gold for 15 points of research and S1(so in a pinch you could use them as communion fodder), while Lore Masters are expensive slow-to-recruit old mages that get three points of wizard randomly spread among all paths. If nothing else, a couple of lucky rolls you break you into paths you had no reasonable expectation of using previously, thus giving you some very nice strategic flexibility that your opponents may well not see coming.  Though it's notably worrying that Gath has 3 out of the 7 thrones needed to win. We could end up seeing a repeat of the first Newbad with an early-game lunge here, and people start muttering about maybe coalitioning against him, though most of them are too focused on securing their personal advantages for now(see, the dogpile against Bogarus, Patala vs Agartha, etc.), and no one wants to give up that to do something for the good of everyone(i.e. someone not winning the game just yet). The psychology behind alliances and coalitions in Dominions 5 makes the Prisoner's Dilemma seem like a simple choice between whether to buy chocolate or strawberry flavour ice cream.  As agreed, Utgard's province only has a bit of fragile PD to deal with.   It also turns out that the province Utgard left us has both a Nature site and a Death site! We have little use for death, but gems are gems, especially in the Late Age where there's general dearth of the drat things. At this point TC has left my borders, but I can only convince him that I'm totally, honestly attacking Utgard for so long(he almost certainly has scouts in the area watching my advance). Sooner or later he's gonna figure out that the jig is up and by then I better have a nice new distraction, defensive measures or a real good excuse. I'm sure it'll all work out.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 4, 2020 20:25
|
|
|
I will always respect Biggs for his spite finishers, those gems and items always end up somewhere to gently caress up his killers. It adds spice to the game.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 5, 2020 14:24
|
|
|
Technowolf posted:More people should realize that whenever they talk to Purple it means he's already decided to traitor them, and should really just traitor him first. I'd like to correct this and point out that sometimes when I talk to people in these games it's just to outright extort them for gold, gems or territory, which isn't technically backstabbing since I'm up front about my motivations. Khisanth Magus posted:As part of my NAP with Purple, however, I also get the info(which turned out to be 100% a lie) that TC is going to attack me. Hey, as far as I knew, he was going to attack you. It's not my fault that he was planning to backstab me while I was planning to backstab him.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 5, 2020 21:04
|
|
|
Alex0080 posted:My empire is almost entirely the same as last turn, but I check out Mictlan's border fort and see a King of Rain sitting there. Nothing I can prove anything with, but I decide to watch this fort very closely, it's clear that this is where inevitable betrayal will come from. He was actually part of a very innocent site-searching crew. The fact that said sites' gem production would have been used for something non-innocent, on the other hand, you should just ignore.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 6, 2020 09:04
|
|
|
Buller posted:How often do you guys meet to play, and are you playing blitz in the beginning? We don't meet to play. Basically there's a service on the SA Dominions Discord, the Snek, which allows us to play asynchronously by being always up and managing the whole "hosting the game"-aspect more or less hands off unless the game start needs to reset or change the timer. Most games start off on a 24-hour turn-timer, then advance to a 36 and late game it's a 48 since the nations that aren't fighting brave last stands may well have a lot of armies to coordinate and troops to program, especially if they're making use of sabbaths or communions.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 14, 2020 11:05
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 19:14 |
|
|
Mictlan Turn 27  Despite having four or five quite huntable provinces, my blood income is crippled by my poor research decisions, as I'm sure I've mentioned earlier and still lament. Without those SDR's online, I'm just plain going to have a hell of a time pulling in a meaningful amount of blood slaves. My site searchers are also not having anything resembling luck, though at least my patrolling slave herds are having a fun time mangling dissenters. At this point I believe we're still a turn or two off TC figuring out I've betrayed him to Utgard.  All troop movements during this turn are me reshuffling site searchers and patrollers in an attempt to have a vaguely functioning economy, while pumping out as many sacreds as my poor gold income can permit. Turn 28  Another quiet turn, and Luck 3 is really failing to pay off in the way it's done for me in some other games.  On the other hand, Luck is exponentially more powerful with more territory and dominion, since as far as I can tell the boosted event rate is per province, and a real lucky Luck 3 roll from one province can easily provide as much as income as 20 provinces' worth would provide in one turn.  At this point, note, I've still yet to figure out how much of a difference upgrading my B1's to effective B2's would make. This is basically the game where I figure out effective blood hunting mechanics for the first time.  Still no sign of TC on my borders, so I'm assuming Utgard hasn't yet tipped him off. What wonderfully virtuous giants. Turn 29  I'm still not sure whether I'm just in an exceptionally gem-dry part of the map or whether every site inside my borders is just Air/Earth.   More Dominion is fine since it's something I have a hard time coming by without splattering blood everywhere and +15 free PD is nothing to sneeze at, even though Mictlan's default PD is hot dogshit that could get flattened by children with sticks.  But wait, what's this? Mictlan's armies are on the move...? Yes, it finally happened, TC figured out that I backstabbed him and was somewhat cross about it. However, somehow, I literally do not understand how or why, I convinced him not to take revenge on me, and instead to join me in attacking Marignon, this time with the iron-clad agreement of "I won't betray you until I've taken at least three provinces from him, and this deal comes with a 15-turn NAP." I, of course, plan to betray him to Marignon in exchange for 3 provinces at the first possible opportunity. I mean, why wouldn't I? I just need to both run down the NAP timer and convince TC I have a legitimate reason to bail on the war. The gears start grinding away in my brain as Pan asks me whether I'm planning to attack him and I curtly tell him that no, his hippie forest is safe for the time being. Turn 30  I start casting Bind Beast Bats to get some more sacreds online, which is theoretically a good idea except that I can't think of many blesses that make Beast Bats worth having unless you're getting them as free side-effects of Onaqui. Summoning them directly is a pretty egregrious waste of blood slaves and caster turns. Oh and there's the problem that since they're demons, I'll also need to allocate a decent blood mage or two to lead them, which I had forgotten to do and they're all being summoned in a province with lame B1 Mictlan Priests. Whoops.  Beast bats' bite also cause 50 points' worth of fatigue from poison if it goes through. So my theory is that they're great against small numbers of big targets, like giants, but suck rear end against normal troops unless someone forgets to guard their commander while fighting Mictlan which is the opposite of a pro gamer move.  Of course being on-damage rather than on-hit, a 10-damage attack is gonna bounce off a lot of armor ratings without a good roll. A strength bless of some kind of course helps them get around this limitation, or being present in the Early Ages, where people have yet to invent protecting themselves, and where giants and the like are also a lot more common.  I'm sure Eyes of God has been discussed before, but it basically gives you a scout in every province on the map, making it great for keeping track of enemy movements, seeing what provinces of theirs are worth snapping up, and if you're fighting elves or the like I believe it also defuses their Glamour inside your Dominion(where you get extra-accurate reports). It also boosts patrolling, so great for blood nations and catching enemy scouts/assassins. On top of that it lets you see the game's graphs. Usually EoG going up will start some wars because either A) someone goes "oh gently caress someone can see my plans, GOTTA TAKE HIM OUT" or B) whoever puts up EoG starts posting graphs and going "uhhhh, hey guys, this fella's running away with the game." and you get some coalition-forming or people realizing that some of their neighbours are paper tigers and going to clown town on them. It's also the only Global that has a specific counter-ritual, Fate of Oedipus, that takes down EoG for a fixed cost of 75 fire gems while also exploding the global-holder's eyes out of his head.  There's good friend TC, I'm sure he wouldn't backstab me, since he knows how reliable I am. Turn 31   Gath claims another throne. Should we be worried? Probably not. I'm sure that a blood nation in a vanilla game with giants is no problem at all. I also summon some Jaguars, which are pretty good. Double attacks means they double up on any weapon/strength bless that Mictlan rolls with, their main weakness is that they're somewhat fragile, being completely unarmoured animals, though they're usually beefy enough to eat one hit before going down even so. They'd combo well with a Barkskin/weapons/strength bless sort of setup. In general Barkskin benefits Mictlan's naked or near-naked sacreds a lot in all eras.  This is also the worst luck I've ever had in a game with positive Luck scales. Goddammit. Though it should be noted that I believe the JBBM mod also buffs Luck slightly, to defuse the otherwise-reigning Misfortune meta.  And a hero shows up! Mictlan doesn't have a lot, and most of them are pretty lame, but Mictlipoctli is great.  He has Mictlan's only Death access that isn't the occasional one-in-forty or so D1 Nahualli, and at D3 at that, as well as being Blood 3, he improves Mictlan's path variety a lot and he can also re-animate corpses as soulless, and the endless blood nation cycle of blood hunting to unrest to patrolling to dead people produces a lot of corpses, so he can do a lot to benefit your chaff economy as well. There are also a few Blood/Death crosspath spells that are very worth casting, especially in vanilla Dominions 5. JBBM takes the steam out of making an infinite vampire engine somewhat.   The turn's two sites are also a bit unusual, one because it passively lowers unrest, the other because it allows you to waste a priest's turn to recruit one of the worst potential troops in the game. I mean, if you have a "pure" priest with nothing but H paths, maybe an H1 or something, you'll often have no better use for him, but for nations like Mictlan where all our priests are also mages, we'd basically never want to do this. Foulspawn are randomly generated and have a few quite strong outcomes and a lot that are practically worse than slaves and soulless, so it's nothing you really want to gamble on.  My troops near Marignon's border and next turn he'll see them. That's when negotiations will start in earnest, ideally after I've snagged a province or two of his already and can negotiate from a position of strength, though I don't want to hit him up too late, either, because if he gets chunked too hard, he won't believe that me letting off pressure will let him handle TC and he'll flip us both off and do a spiteful last stand rather than dedicating everything to loving up my neighbour, which I'd really prefer.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 15, 2020 08:39
|
|