Dominions 4 Teasers

K · Post by K » Sun Sep 08, 2013 7:08 pm

The major problem with Chaos Power is that demons are going to suck when they attack Order nations.

-------

I just ran a quick test with Awake Dom 10s and 9 initial provinces.

Over 20 turns:

Growth 3 gave around 15K.

Luck3/Turmoil3 gave 12K.

Order3 was 20K.

Turmoil3/Luck3/Growth3 gave 15K.

Order3/Luck3 gave 21.5K.

Growth3 gave 15K.

Zero Scales: 12K

Gems were generally around 140-150 barring sites in the initial provinces. Luck nations didn't seem to get much extra gems, maybe +20. Misfortune nations seemed to have less gems, maybe -40.

Variance on income was high. I ran four nations at Order 3 and Growth 3 and got one at 16K, 13K, 17K, and 15K.

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Sun Sep 08, 2013 7:23 pm

Do the changes to the requirements for a lot of the path boosting items (particularly the +2 to the Rings) mess up any of the standard bootstrapping paths? Death in particular seems to be a lot harder to get into from a single D2 now that the Skullface is D5 and Ring of Sorcery is S7.

koz · Post by **koz** » Sun Sep 08, 2013 7:58 pm

Red_Rob wrote:Do the changes to the requirements for a lot of the path boosting items (particularly the +2 to the Rings) mess up any of the standard bootstrapping paths? Death in particular seems to be a lot harder to get into from a single D2 now that the Skullface is D5 and Ring of Sorcery is S7.

Death now needs Death 4 to get started in bootstrapping, rather than Death 2. Astral instead requires you to have either S6 or E2S5. Otherwise, I think it's pretty much the same way it used to be.

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Sun Sep 08, 2013 9:29 pm

Another HOLY CRAP change: Sailing has a much larger range than before. In Dom3 sailing allowed you to go over adjacent water province W to any land province itself adjacent to W. Now, it lets you go over adjacent water province W1, then over water province W2 (which is adjacent to W1), and then to any land province adjacent to W2. In effect, you can skip over an additional water province.

Given that water provinces tend to be pretty damn big, and touch a lot of land provinces, hopping two water provinces in a single bound potentially gives you an ENORMOUS range of movement options.

Old
A -> W -> B

New
A -> W1 -> W2 -> B

That helps make up a bit for the 80 design points LA Atlantis lost.

K · Post by K » Sun Sep 08, 2013 11:03 pm

Was fucking around with Earth gem Alchemy and turned the max of 300 gems into 5083 gold with only Earth 3. At Earth 6 I turned 101 gems into 2300 gold.

Looks like max that you can dump into a ritual is 100 times your path level. That's an interesting change.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Mon Sep 09, 2013 12:25 am

That was without an Alchemy bonus?

K · Post by K » Mon Sep 09, 2013 1:28 am

Orion wrote:That was without an Alchemy bonus?

Yes.

K · Post by K » Mon Sep 09, 2013 6:00 am

Pretty sure that the deeper red numbers that sometimes rise off of units are morale damage.

Morale tab also includes number of kills.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Mon Sep 09, 2013 12:10 pm

So... Edi sent me a long PM and took exception to what I said.

Slow-to-recruit (StR) is explicitly said to have not undergone much thought on balance. Kristoff didnt even have a list of which mages were StR until Dom3Mod people gave him one. When challenged on this Edi basically said "If we tried to balance it we will need two months. Just mod it to fix it".

So, to be fair, I'll post what he actually said in verbatim, with the relevant portion regarding StR in bold:

Slow to recruit is very much separate from terrain based recruitment, so try not to conflate them.

Making thorough terrain based changes to all nations at this stage would push the release back another two months. The terrain based recruitment (as opposed to general non-fort recruitment) was not added until 3.97 or 3.98, so just a couple of weeks before the beta release, so it was not even possible before.

Also, there is a serious issue of playability with making too many of that type of changes. Mountain provinces are very rare things in default random maps due to impassable mountains. There are more of them in where mountains are not impassable barriers, but the suggestion about Caelum, while thematic, would make it completely unplayable and mainly raptor based on most maps.

At this stage, some of these things are going to have to be addressed by mods while waiting for a patch, if such changes are desirable.

This post is not meant as a rebuke, but an explanation of how and why things are as they are.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Mon Sep 09, 2013 1:46 pm

I tried out Lemuria a bit. Not really a fan, honestly. The more powerful summoned commanders are immortal, but they also cost 30+ gems. All the guys you call in with priests or freespawn are ethereal, but their weapons are MR negates.

And they've inherited the old Ashen Empire problem of freespawning dudes all over the place but not significant numbers of commanders.

Their summoned mages aren't even that great. You spend 30 gems for an S1D2H2 guy and 50 for an S3D3H2 guy.

K · Post by K » Mon Sep 09, 2013 7:05 pm

name_here wrote:
Their summoned mages aren't even that great. You spend 30 gems for an S1D2H2 guy and 50 for an S3D3H2 guy.

For those kinds of prices and picks, you are better off using the default summoned Death mages or even empowering other purchased/summoned mages in Death and letting them become Wight Mages.

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Mon Sep 09, 2013 7:11 pm

Yeah, Lemuria is rough. They actually expand against indies quite well because indies just can not handle an army of ethereal dudes, especially not when you have 20+ dispossessed spirits to distract with. Also, everything you have can fight just fine underwater, and etheral undead are doubly effective against coral spears. Also, Lemurians have higher-than-average MR so H1 banish spam is less of an issue than you might think, given that indie forces rarely have more than 1 priest present.

Now, you WILL have hundreds of dis. spirits because your domain spawns them for free and your H1 priests (who sometimes spawn for free as well) can generate them ten at a time, but as soon as those are unable to win your battles (e.g. because the enemy has magical reach weapons like LA Atlantis, or can simply bring enough banishment spam to the fight), then you're in a tough spot. Once ethereal is no longer an issue, you're looking at a force that is essentially a small number of prot-0 humans with sub-par spears and sub-par shields (they look like towershields, but they are statted like bucklers or regular shields), along with a bunch of size-1, 1hp speedbumps. Unless you get extremely lucky with your site searching, you will be starved for death gems and simply won't be able to summon enough dinky acolytes to research with, let alone enough theurges to do communions or enough archtheurges to dominate the battlefield.

In theory you could get into the middle game with apparitions. The thing is, if a fight goes WELL for Lemuria, it's basically padded sumo. One side is unable to hit ethereal stuff (or too paralyzed or fatigued to attempt it) and the other side is having to poke with strength-10 spear attacks that are MR-negates. Time, fatigue, and sheer numbers allow Lemuria to win, and Apparitions make that happen faster by actually hitting stuff (no mr-negates or drain/paralyze attack) and having fear. However, you have to lose 100 population from the province per Apparition you summon. Since you took death-3 (because duh) and because your domain kills population at an alarming rate, you will actually find yourself running out of population to throw into the Apparition grinder.

And that's about it for Lemuria. Even if Apparitions didn't cost population, you'd still have too little money to build forts/temples (to get semi-worthwhile free-spawn), too few mages, and too few commanders. The nation feels incomplete, at best.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Mon Sep 09, 2013 7:31 pm

True, the huge problem that makes them worse than Ashen Empire is that their freespawn simply are not as useful. Dispossessed spirits literally can't kill things, and as far as I can tell they're the only thing you get from unimproved provinces. The only thing Lemuria seems to have going for it is the capacity to make fights drag on and immunity to a number of large-AoE or battlefield spells. In theory a viable late-game plan would be using the new Death evocations and a bunch of fatigue-inducers to obliterate enemy armies held in place by masses of ethereal dudes, but that takes research that's at a premium due to the death gem and caster turn bottleneck on getting commanders of all stripes.

K · Post by K » Mon Sep 09, 2013 7:38 pm

I wonder if focusing on Shade Beasts instead of Apparitions might be the answer? With the holy spells to boost attack skill and poison attack, they should hit reasonably hard.

You definitely need Earth and/or Nature on your Pretender. Mid-game seems impossible without armoring up your units.

Probably Water and Nature too for the temp pearls from clams to keep Antimagic on your armies.

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Mon Sep 09, 2013 8:05 pm

The main problem I had with Shade Beasts were
1) You need at least an H2 to spawn them. You mainly want to spend your death gems summoning cheap H1s: either the super cheap H1 priest that can summon chaff or lead a bunch of undead and still spam undead buffs, or the D1H1 Acolyte because those guys can actually research. H2s and H3s are not very practical to summon in quantity for Lemuria, and even then, each of those H2+ priests get you 1 Shade Beast/turn.

2) Ideally you want 1 shade beast in the middle of a square full of chaff (mainly dis. spirits) so your precious summon gets hit as little as possible. However, shade beasts have a very high movement speed so they tend to run ahead of your normally-sluggish forces and get butchered. Putting them behind the blob of dis. spirits doesn't work in the opposite direction because it'll usually take 3-6 turns of combat before your shade beasts can actually muscle through the crowd and start hitting stuff. Oh, and dis. spirits are undisciplined so you can't do "Hold and Attack" on a mixed group of spirits and beasts and hope the enemy walks up to you in time.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Sep 09, 2013 8:13 pm

Changes in the combat and positioning system are going to make a lot of really striking differences. I was tootling around with Jotunheim, and holy crap. You walk in with less than twenty guys and you walk out with the same guys because you don't take any losses. The existence of line formations means that instead of having your giants overrun and swarmed to death, that just doesn't happen. And the changes to repel are all in your favor too. It's like Dominions 2 all over again, small stacks of giants simply run over and murder everything in their path. Not regenerating super blessed giants, regular giants who happen to be wearing heavy armor.

I don't know how fast you could expand with a Productivity Iron Woods or Utgard, but I can already tell that the answer is very fast indeed. Ten Jotun Hirdmen cost as much gold as a temple and seem to be able to steamroller indies like they were jaguar warriors.

The metagame is going to take some time to shake out. I am not confident that I can spot overall balance issues (other than really obvious ones like "MA Agartha is still an unfinished faction) at this point. Anyone working on a "balance mod" at this point probably has their head in their ass.

-Username17

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Mon Sep 09, 2013 9:21 pm

I always liked Jotunheim thematically. It's nice to hear that later ages are shaping up to be something I'll have an easier time playing.

K · Post by K » Mon Sep 09, 2013 11:54 pm

The D1H1 are not your research option. Better to summon revenants for less gems.

Like I said, the standard Death mages are better.

Korwin · Post by **Korwin** » Tue Sep 10, 2013 3:46 am

3.99g is out.

K · Post by K » Tue Sep 10, 2013 6:17 pm

Looks like MA Argartha got Slave Trogoldytes, a Slaver Trainer commander, the two pact spells from ES Agartha, and access to Wet Ones (siege bonus) in land provinces.

Their second Bless unit gets boulders (5) now. That's cool. Did anyone ever imagine a world where MA Agartha would want an Air Bless?

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Tue Sep 10, 2013 7:35 pm

Yeah, Kristoffer poked his head up here looking for feedback about the changes. I'd recommend testing the Agartha tweaks ASAP and posting about it on Invision or Desura soon to catch the developer's attention and/or cut-off the people providing dumb suggestions.

I must admit it's rather exciting seeing a sympathetic dev actually taking and running with community feedback. Given that channel, I hope the signal-to-noise ratio remains high.

K · Post by K » Tue Sep 10, 2013 8:14 pm

Mmmm, the deeper red is Profuse Bleeding. Or morale. Can't seem to tell.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Sep 10, 2013 8:50 pm

I notice a dark red zero appear over enemies when they lose their cool and start routing.

-Username17

K · Post by K » Tue Sep 10, 2013 8:57 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:I notice a dark red zero appear over enemies when they lose their cool and start routing.

-Username17

I think it's Profuse Bleeding. I just had it show up in a few battles in a row on non-routing units.

It shows up as an blood drop icon.

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Tue Sep 10, 2013 9:41 pm

Yup, Profuse Bleeding. I believe piercing weapons (in addition to reducing armor by 20%) have a chance of causing that condition.