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 Conquest of Elysium 5 is the latest game from Swedish dev team Illwinter Software, mostly known for their Dominions series of fantasy 4X games. The CoE series is actually their original game project from when they were known as Magical Science, with the first title being released in the 90s for the Atari Falcon. More recent versions have added more modern features: in particular, CoE4 added actual battle maps that units move across, and most of the old 90s-era sprites have been replaced with higher resolution assets, but the bones of the game are still pretty old  The goal of the game is simple: you're a wizard (or a fish cultist, or a birdman, or a big troll or something) in Elysium and you want to conquest it. As with Master of Magic and Dominions there's no campaign or ongoing plot, just you trying to take over the map and kill your chosen competitors with whatever tools you have at your disposal. If you lose all your citadels OR you lose all your commanders it's game over, so be careful!   Gameplay is split into two parts: the strategic map where you move your armies and manage your faction, and a tactical layer where combat happens  https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/519542011297136657/881710571987283978/EnchanterEndgame.mp4 As in Dominions you do not control the tactical layer directly: you can equip units with magical items and you have some control over what spells your mages use but that's it. Planes  The map is split into 9? different planes. You'll play through a lot of games without ever seeing more than the three 'basic' planes (Elysium, Sky and Agartha) and very frequently opening passages to other planes will just make life more difficult for you (Inferno is filled with armies of brutal monsters, Primal is filled with brutal monsters and Irish mythological figures, Void is filled with brutal monsters and being there makes your commanders crazy etc) but there's a ton of stuff to find. I've played the game a bunch but I've still barely touched planar stuff Online Manual Discord CoE 4 thread
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Aug 31, 2021 23:59
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 A big draw of the game is the variance between the different factions: there are 24 of them and many of them play very differently. I haven't played nearly all of them but here are the ones I've tried so far in coe5: Troll King Probably the faction with the most powerful starting army, the troll king has a huge health pool, armor and regeneration. He can deal with a huge number of mooks and expand quickly. Can be killed very quickly with spells like soul slay and decay and can't deal with getting set on fire so watch out. After a year or two his mom shows up, she (or other shamans you might be offered to hire) can harvest fungus and turn forests into carrion monster factories. The carrion monsters can't be controlled directly but will roam around capturing sites for you. Enchanter One of the weakest factions early on, the enchanter has a dizzying amount of rituals available: he can turn 1 iron into a fragile animated sword, bow or two spears, if he's in a swamp he can make free heavy pike infantry out of clay (or just turn the swamp into a clay golem), he can use corpses to make snakes out of bones that mind control people, he can make tools that increase the output of his mines (or just turn the mines into more golems.) His high level golems that are created using the most valuable mining sites will stomp hundreds of enemies while taking little damage but they can also be killed very quickly by necromancers and demons using Decay spells Illusionist The illusionist makes mirrors that spit out spells or illusionary troops. The illusions' attacks can be resisted but not easily and the highest level mirrors spit out extremely deadly monster illusions. Can also use mirrors to travel quickly between strongholds across the map. Has mages that are extremely powerful against humans and animals, confusing or putting to sleep huge swathes of non-mindless enemies Scourge Lord The Scourge Lord makes pillars and pyramids that drain life from surrounding tiles, eventually turning them into desert. He can use the drained life to summon monsters: one possible outcome of his level 2 summoning ritual is an ant queen that creates a mound that creates more ant queens. After a few years you might have a huge patch of ant mounds and you can go scoop up some ants for your armies (they're pretty strong.) Can also easily create more mage commanders which is unusual. The scourge lord, his commanders and many of his monstrous troops benefit from a passive 'Dark Blessing' effect and the scourge lord can invest resources in this blessing to receive random bonuses, potentially making it absurdly powerful at the maximum of 20 casts Cloud Lord The Cloud Lord is another faction that starts out weak. He recruits small numbers of relatively fragile winged troops and will have trouble holding surface sites against other factions, but his armies can move easily between the sky and surface layers which lets him monopolize the sky and raid an enemy's back line. Ground troops move slowly on the Sky layer and can't cross gaps like the Cloud Lord can so once the Cloud Lord has a few sky cities he's difficult to root out. Once he hits his stride he can very quickly take over big swathes of the map since all his stuff flies or floats and his high level summons are very powerful Kobold King Little kobolds (lizard, not dog) that worship dragons. The kobold king's shamans and wizards can create hatcheries in large mines that create free kobold troops depending on the color of gem found in the mine. They can also summon a friendly AI-controlled dragon to the mine that will sometimes fly out and capture nearby sites but will mostly hang out in the mine and help defend it. Your line troops are weak but between the lazy dragons and the free kobolds it's very difficult for enemy factions and random wildlife to easily march in and conquer your mine strongholds. Also, each color of kobold is immune to poison or an element depending on their color (i.e. red kobolds are immune to fire) making army building very simple - stick red kobold sorcerors with red kobolds and you'll never have to worry about friendly fire. Just make sure to check your blue sorcerers to make sure they don't have Hail Storm memorized
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Sep 1, 2021 00:00
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Be CAREFUL with the troll king, he is very dumb and he can be mindcontrolled by almost anything. I had to savescum a bit to win with him, especially as I wasn't sure which enemies would do that.
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Sep 1, 2021 01:03
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He also doesn't have Trample or Sweep, so he can only kill one thing a turn. Any random apprentice mage that can summon chaff can and will kill him.
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Sep 1, 2021 01:11
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His default weapon actually does have sweep in coe5. I definitely wouldn't send him solo against any kind of mage though, you can't see what spells a mage has until you fight them and most mages have access to at least one spell thats a death sentence for him
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Sep 1, 2021 01:22
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Yeah, anything that does a good amount of fire damage or targets magic resistance with a potential instant-win effect can chump the Troll King. He's a beast aside from that though. Now, the King of the Deep, there's a commander who gets owned easy. One lucky exploding damage roll and a Lost an Eye result, and he's just a big piece of mobile cover 
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Sep 1, 2021 01:38
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One thing that's notable about this one is how moddable it is compared to previous versions. Alas, much of the documentation is lacking, making the endeavour a practice of arcane trickery for some things, but the workshop has really taken off, with some interesting mods already up.
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Sep 1, 2021 01:58
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i don't think it's exceptionally more moddable than CoE4, people are just more willing to try when there's a mechanism to actually share their work outside of obscure steam forums posts. you're still basically twiddling the same dials as you could before
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Sep 1, 2021 02:01
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There are also just a lot more people playing in general. CoE4 peaked at 231 concurrent players according to Steamcharts, CoE5 has hit 1171 concurrent players and still peaks at 500+ daily two weeks after release
Flavahbeast fucked around with this message at 02:10 on Sep 1, 2021 |
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Sep 1, 2021 02:06
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There's an entire new event system for modding that wasn't there in CoE4, it lets you do quite a lot with conditional operators, it's quite expanded over the modding event system CoE3 had as well in that events and their operators/effects can be tied to pretty much anything instead of just to maps. In CoE4 you could make a summoning spell like: When cast, summon 5 butts. Costs 50% less if you are in a swamp. In CoE5 you can make a summoning spell like: When cast, summon 5 butts if you are in the infernal plane. if you are in Hades, instead spawn 5 hostile butts at your nearest citadel. If you are on Elysium, then ignore the butts and terraform 3 random mountains within 15 tiles of you into swamp and then summon 1d6 swamp butts in them if you have already summoned at least 100 butts throughout the game. I think things like a tile that produces resources but only if you have a certain kind of worker unit on it should be possible, or spells that have different effects in each season, "quests" with dialog popups, units that move across the world map like chess pieces (kind of a stretch, you'd need to control it through something awkward like rituals),  Here's the modding manual which is still about 1/3 unwritten like NewMars mentioned: http://www.illwinter.com/coe5/coe5modding.html deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 02:18 on Sep 1, 2021 |
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Sep 1, 2021 02:07
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Flavahbeast posted:There are also just a lot more people playing in general. CoE4 peaked at 231 concurrent players according to Steamcharts, CoE5 has hit 1171 concurrent players and still peaks at 500+ daily two weeks after release Hey that's pretty awesome, good for the trillwinter guys!
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Sep 1, 2021 02:32
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deep dish peat moss posted:There's an entire new event system for modding that wasn't there in CoE4… I feel like I’ve got the start of a mod idea here… Replacing elephants, if nothing else. Maybe Hoburg cavalry?
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Sep 1, 2021 03:15
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I warlocked and died of gem starvation and also of a Hades invasion coming from a spot on an island. At least unlike in COE4 I could buy boats and sail there, but I died first. Also I witched and died of hell invasion. My T3 witch and her army took five turns to reach the game and moved on top of it with her army's last MP, then the entire back row got seduced by the succubi of the megastack that passed through between my turns.
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Sep 1, 2021 03:30
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ps newmars please include shark knights from dom in your upcoming baron planar recruitment mod
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Sep 1, 2021 07:47
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StrixNebulosa posted:Be CAREFUL with the troll king, he is very dumb and he can be mindcontrolled by almost anything. I had to savescum a bit to win with him, especially as I wasn't sure which enemies would do that. I had a multiplayer run with a friend playing Dryad queen where he just straight up stole the troll king first combat. Great way to dispose of an AI faction.
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Sep 1, 2021 15:28
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SIGSEGV posted:I warlocked and died of gem starvation and also of a Hades invasion coming from a spot on an island. At least unlike in COE4 I could buy boats and sail there, but I died first. I played an Airlock and I would never even attempt the others. Gems are so rare but an air warlock can Perpetual Storm any tile for 2 gem income and/or Cloud Castle it for 4 gem income. Given how long a game can go on, if you're screwing around, it is great.
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Sep 1, 2021 15:38
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 I enjoy this game
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Sep 1, 2021 15:48
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Decrepus posted:I played an Airlock and I would never even attempt the others. Gems are so rare but an air warlock can Perpetual Storm any tile for 2 gem income and/or Cloud Castle it for 4 gem income. Given how long a game can go on, if you're screwing around, it is great. Yeah, it's a shame that it's restart time 3 out of 4 times, so sometimes I decide that maybe the earth warlock will do it for me and I just loving die.
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Sep 1, 2021 18:47
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any starting warlock can do fine. you definitely want to promote an apprentice into an air warlock eventually because they scale so ridiculously and can explore the sky for even more diamonds and gold, but your starting element just...doesn't really matter much. your regular troops led by the starting warlock should carry you over until you manage to promote more warlocks because all 4 can be big force multipliers. earth warlocks have to get a bit lucky on spells though, if they don't have earth meld they won't contribute as much to early expansion as the other warlock types can. if they do though any small-medium stack of troops is just going to melt under your archers because earth gripped units have no defense. fire and water warlocks melt indies with direct damage and seem to be much better at avoiding friendly fire than they were in CoE4. your eventual goal is to make rainbow stacks with all warlock types involved because an army with tons of warlock buffs, debuffs, big damage spells, etc. is extremely hard to kill and very good at killing other things. takes a long time before you have the gem income to reasonably do this though. Jazerus fucked around with this message at 19:13 on Sep 1, 2021 |
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Sep 1, 2021 18:57
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Got to heaven as a Voice of El but I have no idea how El is supposed to attack and dethrone god, holy prayers just don't cut it against mapwide meteor storms and hundreds of angels.
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Sep 1, 2021 19:10
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Was fighting a brutal war against a Scourge Lord as a High Priestess, making gains when some dipshit opened a portal to the primal plane and now a bunch of angry titans, boars and snakes with goat heads run around everywhere lol. Lost two of my main armies but on the other hand I haven't seen an AI stack in ages so I guess they have a slight titan infestation as well. One of my lost armies managed to find an Ancient Forest with a portal marker guarded by a Beast Totem that I assume is the actual portal. Took it only for some dipshit titan with a bunch of elves in tow to appear through it brutaly murder my poor gal. Is it a random chance for these gates to open or is it actually units wandering on them that causes it? I have seen event text for the infernal gate mention both wizards and Mad Cultists and I did murder some of the latter in a random hamlet I conquered earlier. Gonna try and slug this one out, maybe outlast my opponents at least.
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Sep 1, 2021 22:39
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I'm pretty sure it's done by specific "NPC" stacks wandering into the right locations. Ghost mages can open portals to Hades in ruined castles, for example.
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Sep 1, 2021 22:55
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Noir89 posted:Was fighting a brutal war against a Scourge Lord as a High Priestess, making gains when some dipshit opened a portal to the primal plane and now a bunch of angry titans, boars and snakes with goat heads run around everywhere lol. Lost two of my main armies but on the other hand I haven't seen an AI stack in ages so I guess they have a slight titan infestation as well. It's my understanding that the units either spawn on the map at the beginning, or an event happens that causes the units to spawn, who will then target a nearby location of the right kind and when there will start opening the portal to all the assorted bad places.
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Sep 2, 2021 01:44
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do the fellowship of the ring do anything if you leave them alone?
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Sep 2, 2021 02:07
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Nanomashoes posted:Got to heaven as a Voice of El but I have no idea how El is supposed to attack and dethrone god, holy prayers just don't cut it against mapwide meteor storms and hundreds of angels. Is the location siegable? If so, bring the biggest stack of siege weapons you can muster. They will all get a bunch of free attacks before the fight even starts. You can probably also get a wizard with army-wide fire shield as El, but that's just random recruitment chance, you can't force it. (Any type of fire wizard should be able to learn it at a library at least, I think the army-wide one is a level 3 spell) deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 02:31 on Sep 2, 2021 |
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Sep 2, 2021 02:28
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Flavahbeast posted:do the fellowship of the ring do anything if you leave them alone? I'm pretty sure they just wander around picking fights until they die. Cute little Easter egg though.
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Sep 2, 2021 09:26
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I've seen some talk about the Kobold King being especially good, but I haven't found a way to make them really excel. You get a lot of cheap kobolds, but a half decent bulky summon can kill basically infinite kobolds. Drakes are good value for their price, but you can't recruit them reliably. The only thing you can summon that can stand up to the top-tier units of other armies are dragons and Elder dragons, but you only get one of each per mine and because they're AI-controlled you can't bring them anywhere, they'll just sit around and occasionally fly out into the middle of nowhere. Since you're limited to kobold recruitment for the most part, you can't hire stuff like high-level wizards and catapults that the more money-heavy factions can use to even the odds against the wizards either.
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Sep 2, 2021 14:32
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Kobolds get to buy a lot of their level 2 sorcerers, especially once you get a few colors of hatchery going. Once you upgrade a sorcerer or shaman (shaman is much cheaper) you can get dragonspawn kobolds of that color that are surprisingly good; they cost gems, but your mage promotions are so expensive and dragons are so useless that you might as well just make a million dragonspawn. Red kobolds really suck compared to the other colors though, so if you get a red start then prioritize getting better colors up and running ASAP the holy poopacy fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Sep 2, 2021 |
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Sep 2, 2021 15:47
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Midgame kobolds can give other factions a huge headache specifically because of their lovely troops, and the abovementioned spellcasters - they can easily afford to throw away waves and waves of expendable meat shields while their casters indiscriminately blow everything up with little fear of friendly fire due to their inherent immunity (unless they're fielding armies of mixed colours for some reason). Kobolds are awesome at both causing and shrugging off lots of incremental attrition. They might not be able to put together an all-comers doomstack that bulldozes everything it ever meets, but they don't need to; while that super army is trudging along, they're running circles around it capturing stuff with three big expendable armies, all of which they can probably afford to lose, and none of which the doomstack can crush without risking meaningful losses.
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Sep 2, 2021 16:07
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If you stick to just one or two colors of the young dragons, those particular drakes and sorcerers become considerably more common in exchange for being more prone to friendly fire on defense. I say this, because green sorcerers and frost drakes and many many stacked trap rituals let me tackle an infernal invasion a bit more adeptly than I expected, despite forgetting I could fly white kobolds directly to the portal. It wasn’t ideal, but better than I expected before elder dragons.
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Sep 2, 2021 16:23
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Inadequately posted:I've seen some talk about the Kobold King being especially good, but I haven't found a way to make them really excel. You get a lot of cheap kobolds, but a half decent bulky summon can kill basically infinite kobolds. Drakes are good value for their price, but you can't recruit them reliably. The only thing you can summon that can stand up to the top-tier units of other armies are dragons and Elder dragons, but you only get one of each per mine and because they're AI-controlled you can't bring them anywhere, they'll just sit around and occasionally fly out into the middle of nowhere. Since you're limited to kobold recruitment for the most part, you can't hire stuff like high-level wizards and catapults that the more money-heavy factions can use to even the odds against the wizards either. Combining huge amounts of element-immune troops with a battlefield wide spell is one of the easiest ways to dunk on huge AI armies and kobolds can do it earlier than anyone. If you capture a level 2 library you can send all of your blue kobold sorcerers to school to learn Blizzard https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/519542011297136657/878456094127693854/nomi.mp4 They also eventually get access to the best recruitable archer in the game, the white dragonspawn
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Sep 2, 2021 18:47
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Oh my god do people actually let battles play out at that speed? I always set the animation speed to the highest and also mash S whenever there's a fight.
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Sep 3, 2021 00:59
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I think thats from the first campaign I played and I didnt know about mashing S but also I wanted to watch that one, because that big tengu+kappa stack kept loving me up
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Sep 3, 2021 01:29
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Don't have the game, but talked a bit to someone who played it a lot, and this is the advice he gave: Think of this game as player vs environment, with the enemy AIs being the final non-optional boss (final optional boss being head honchos of other planes) - put all the enemy players on the same team. If you think that's too strong, start with fewer enemies. Would you rather have big battles with diverse enemies or find out that they all ended up mostly killing each other before even meeting you? Activate the option that a player won't be defeated unless their whole team loses all commanders/citadels. Sometimes the AI does early fuckups that it could recover from if they weren't insant loss conditions. Don't limit yourself to playing one faction per game. You can give yourself a pair of factions, to try them both out side by side, and enjoy complementing gameplay that playing just a single faction won't give you. You can easily switch sites around as needed, just have units of the new owner present without any units of the current owner present. If you feel that's making the game easier, then add more AIs, or make them more difficult, or make indies more difficult. The Baron and the Burgmeister are almost built for each other. The Baron improves hamlets and gets free troops from them and villages, it can produce farms from swamps for the hoburgs to make use of, can make use of temples, has solid mobility, and has a diverse but gold constrained magical roster. The Burgmeister can let the Baron cap easy sites ahead of him and doomstack infinite crossbows into anything too tough to crack, he can massively improve farms, has limited magic but it's powered by what said farms produce, and later on gets gems form mines which can also be converted into summons. At the same time, they're thematically similar, and it's easy to imagine the Burgmeister and Baron existing in some sort of a feudal contract if you're the kind of person who roleplays in games like this one.
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Sep 3, 2021 02:34
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Man some of the unit descriptions are a hoot. The following link is to a late game underworld unit, fyi. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2590674408
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Sep 3, 2021 02:38
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Any tips for a newbie who has trouble getting a non-troll game off the ground?
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Sep 3, 2021 02:44
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StrixNebulosa posted:Any tips for a newbie who has trouble getting a non-troll game off the ground? Your main focus early on is on minimizing your losses, which is largely done by avoiding fights that you don't have a clear advantage in or that will otherwise cause loss in your army. You don't need to take every location you pass by, you can come back for them later. Fortified locations with siege weapons, wizards, or lots of ranged units should be avoided until you have tools to deal with them because even if you win, your forces will be wiped out. Mines that have a ton of dwarf arbalests are dangerous too, because they'll all crossbow the heck out of you on the approach, etc. Meeting new creatures and figuring out how dangerous they are is part of the fun IMO, you get a pretty good sense for it over time and you can right click them to inspect them and see exactly what traits they have. Losing your captured locations isn't too big of a deal, don't worry about retreating your forces to grab every little hamlet or coal mine you lost. You can recruit commanders and send them out on their own with no army (or ideally with maybe a scout and a few troops) to re-cap positions or explore more of the map. At the beginning you should mostly scout out the map with a starting force and only take locations that have garrisons of a few soldiers or all-melee garrisons or whatever, try and figure out where the locations that will be important for you are (citadels to recruit in, mines that give you what you need, large sources of whatever your class's resource are, etc). This game isn't really like, say, Civilization where if you don't maximize the potential of your early turns, the AI will take off and snowball ahead of you. It's okay to take it slow sometimes and wait for a larger army before doing much if there's nothing that's safe for you to do. The AI can and will have big power swings from losses to independents or other AIs or whatever. And this is just my personal opinion/advice but I'd say in CoE, especially while new to it, don't make "winning" your goal. Winning just means wiping out the AI players but a whole lot of the game's content (and the most interesting parts imo) is separate from that process - it's the exploration of other planes, the battles against powerful independent forces for unique locations, the summoning of foul armies to march into Hell, etc. The AI factions aren't exactly focused on wiping you out (until possibly way later in the game), though they will take advantage of opportunities you give them to attack you at an advantage. e: Also put scouts in your army whenever possible (for classes that don't have a unit named "scout" just be on the lookout for units with the acute vision/spirit vision traits). This is way more important in CoE5 than it was in earlier games - if you fight against a hidden unit they "ambush" you which means their units start near your commander and your army starts scrambled and jumbled up, it's very very easy to lose even powerful commanders this way, but keeping a scout in your army (and alive) prevents it. deep dish peat moss fucked around with this message at 03:05 on Sep 3, 2021 |
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Sep 3, 2021 03:00
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StrixNebulosa posted:Any tips for a newbie who has trouble getting a non-troll game off the ground? A lot is going to vary from one faction to another. A few generally useful tips: -Don't bash your starting army into tough indie sites unless they're a major game-changer for your faction, just concentrate on scooping up as much easy income as you can and backfill the tough sites later. -Ranged units are a huge force multiplier, although they need a decent size front line to work with; if you get a lot of cheap/free melee troops, prioritize ranged troops, otherwise try to get a good balance between ranged & melee. -Squish wandering indies whenever it's convenient to do so before they can unflag your properties. Try to capture monster spawners like graveyards and bandit lairs (let alone spider thickets/anthills) ASAP so they don't poo poo out more wandering enemies behind your lines. -When you can, try to keep a bit of gold in reserve so you can hire extra mages when they randomly show up (you might need an extra mundane commander or two early on for ferrying troops/exploration.) -Early summons are usually not great but they're often handy for keeping your expansion forces filled out while you build up your income base for more recruits/better summons. -Promoting your mages is crucial for a lot of factions. You'll often need to invest some resources in the first year or two towards survival & expansion (see above) but you do usually want to start saving for promotion a couple years in; level 3 spellcasters can be gamechangers in their own right and they tend to have access to much better summons than starting spellcasters.
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Sep 3, 2021 03:00
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deep dish peat moss and the holy poopacy, thank you for the good posts! Between them and trying what my dad suggested I'm having a fun time playing Dwarf/Kobold vs dunno what yet, two AIs with guaranteed unique commanders. This is going a lot more interestingly than my single commander games so far as I decide who gets what tiles and where to explore.
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Sep 3, 2021 03:14
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my dad posted:Don't have the game, but talked a bit to someone who played it a lot, and this is the advice he gave: In COE4 Baron X Senator was the team to beat: Motte and Baileys could be used as recruitment centers for the Senator.
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Sep 3, 2021 06:27
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