Dominions 4 Teasers

[K]

MA Agatha seems to do just fine with a B9/N9 Bless. Being a big bag of regenerating HPs with a repelling spear that kills things that hit it works pretty well.

Shame that they have no Pretenders that look good for that.

[Shatner]

MA Agatha seems to do just fine with a B9/N9 Bless. Being a big bag of regenerating HPs with a repelling spear that kills things that hit it works pretty well.

Shame that they have no Pretenders that look good for that.

That and isn't having a solitary B9 caster kind of a waste? That's a maxed out magical path that will be able to cast, what... 6?, spells unless you find an actual source of blood slaves.

[name_here]

Blood is the one path that can kind of reverse-bootstrap, so it's arguably more useful to have a Blood-9 caster and no other blood than a Fire-9 with no other fire. It only takes like four-five turns of hunting to get enough slaves to empower.

[K]

MA Agatha seems to do just fine with a B9/N9 Bless. Being a big bag of regenerating HPs with a repelling spear that kills things that hit it works pretty well.

Shame that they have no Pretenders that look good for that.

That and isn't having a solitary B9 caster kind of a waste? That's a maxed out magical path that will be able to cast, what... 6?, spells unless you find an actual source of blood slaves.

Well, a 9 on any Pretender is pretty much a waste outside of the Bless. The odds are good that you are either going to cast one global that you could have cast by bootstrapping a standard national mage (because those are the gems you actually have) and then hide in your castle, or you are going to walk around with one army and pray that no one assassinates your Pretender before he can toss off the big spell you've spent all game researching.

That being said, Blood is the easiest thing to break into. It's even easier now that there is a Blood gem-gen spell and more blood sites that actually generate slaves (some like the Slave Pit that don't even have to be searched for and seems as common as the Arenas used to be).

[Avoraciopoctules]

http://z7.invisionfree.com/Dom3mods/ind ... topic=1590

This map is looking really great

[K]

http://z7.invisionfree.com/Dom3mods/ind ... topic=1590

This map is looking really great

Nice.

I wonder if Dominions would be a more popular game if all the maps were beautiful.

[name_here]

Well, there are a few really, really huge globals that take enough paths bootstrapping is troublesome. Plus, a number of nations, especially in LA, have very little depth in their paths. Without artifacts or empowering, I think you usually can't get more than +3 or +4, which is not terribly impressive on a Mystic. Even so, you're probably best off getting 6 or 7 in the path and bootstrapping from there.

I've never done a serious Blood game, partially because the whole blood-slave shuffle was just too much work. With the new reduction in micro associated with it, I'm tempted to give it a shot. EA Mictlan a good choice for that?

[Korwin]

I've never done a serious Blood game, partially because the whole blood-slave shuffle was just too much work. With the new reduction in micro associated with it, I'm tempted to give it a shot. EA Mictlan a good choice for that?

What? When has that happened?
Or are you talking about an possible future reducing of Micro in asossiation with Blood hunting?

[Shatner]

*) No-path units that have a 100% random (such as MA T'ien Ch'i's Minister of Magic) now require a lab to recruit. Is this intended? The main selling point of many such units was that they were mages that didn't require a lab to recruit.

That was always functionally a bug and it was not intended. It was removed for that reason.

Needing a lab to recruit no path, 100% random mages is a feature, not a bug. That's good to know because, as the game is in beta, you can't be certain what is working as intended and what simply hasn't been made to work right YET.

[Username17]

When blood hunters gather in a province with a lab, the slaves they get over and above what they were assigned last turn go to your dungeons automatically. So you don't have to select all the guys you want to snag slaves from and hit the collect button. Nor do you have to hit the collect all button and then reassign battle slaves.

-Username17

[Shatner]

I'm unsure of the usefulness of MA Asphodel's Carrion Lady. It's an N1H2 that can lead 80 undead and costs 16 nature gems to summon. In contrast, the Carrion Centaur is an H1 that can lead 120 undead and costs 8 nature gems (both are equally difficult to summon in terms of paths and research). The H2 sounds useful (and the AoE-1 undead regeneration spell it offers is nice) but I can save the gems and pay 155gp for a Black Dryad instead (D1N1H2, leads 70 undead). Or I can summon a pair of Carrion Centaurs for leading around hordes of manikins. And since Asphodel can recruit Pan Apostates from every fort, and can recruit their staple researcher from every forest, there is generally less recruitment pressure on your early fort(s) that would make recruiting a Black Dryad truly onerous.

The Carrion Lady does awaken slightly more manikins (an average of 3, +1 over the Carrion Centaur, -1 under the Carrion Lord) but I haven't noticed a meaningful difference in the quality of those manikins, and frankly my dominion spawns enough manikins that I don't feel like spawning 3 more is worth the mage-turn it costs.

In other words, many things the Carrion Lady does, the Carrion Centaur does better and/or cheaper. And for everything else, there's Black Dryads, which do it just as well but cost a small amount of gold to recruit instead of a moderate pile of nature gems. I'm not really seeing the niche for this summon.

[Shatner]

MA Agatha seems to do just fine with a B9/N9 Bless. Being a big bag of regenerating HPs with a repelling spear that kills things that hit it works pretty well.

Shame that they have no Pretenders that look good for that.

I tried this out and yeah, they do get good mileage out of it. It's funny because what you've done is essentially conceded that the only thing Agarthans do well is get punched, so you've optimized them to be the ultimate punching bag. They're so bad at killing stuff they need their enemies to kill themselves instead.

Edit: Ancient Oracles are still pretty bad. Weren't they suppose to get their paths improved? The changes to the national summons are nice.

[K]

When blood hunters gather in a province with a lab, the slaves they get over and above what they were assigned last turn go to your dungeons automatically. So you don't have to select all the guys you want to snag slaves from and hit the collect button. Nor do you have to hit the collect all button and then reassign battle slaves.

-Username17

The problem is that without the old taxation mechanics, the ideal blood hunting tactic is place one hunter per province in order to manage the unrest. This makes building labs for every blood province even less likely, and means that micro goes up because you are using scouts to ferry around slaves.

It seems like the design intent is for blood slave collection to be done in combination with patrolling so that you nose-dive populations, but it's hard for me to see that as a winning tactic.

[Username17]

I think that the optimal blood hunting strategy is to pile on a bunch of blood hunters into one province, just let the unrest spike, and go home with a pile of slaves. You can't shut the taxes off, and unrest falls faster the more of it you have. So a bunch of blood hunters will still stabilize at some highish unrest number.

-Username17

[K]

I wonder if unrest killing your blood hunting has been reduced? I just ran a quick test game with a Blood 9 Pretender and only had three failures to hunt the home province by Early Summer of Year 3. Unrest hovered around 80-120.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Does anyone else get the glitch where nations randomly get some of their research paths super-maxed out for no reason? It just happened to me, I'm rocking Level 64 Construction and Level 75 Enchantment despite never having put a drop of research in either this game. And I've seen it happen to computer players before.

[Doom]

Wow, that's an odd one...I've played at least half a dozen games, never seen it.

[Orion]

Big paths can make a difference on the battlefield. A Fire 9 Phoenix kills a lot more people with falling fires than a Fire 4 one. And once you get Flame Storm, it's nice to have a mage who can cast it 3 or 4 times in a row.

Vortex of Unlife is going to be devastating from a D9 caster, since it scales range, AoE, Damage, and spell penetration.

An Air 9 god can do Mists of Deception and Fog Warriors and Mass Flight all in the same fight. Also, Shimmering Fields really benefits from the damage scaling.

Army of Rats is a new N7! battlefield spell.

[angelfromanotherpin]

A bunch of summon spells also scale with path rating. You can seriously get between 2 and 3 times as many units per cast with an uber-path mage than with a bare-requirements caster.

[Orion]

Yes, although relatively few of those summon anything so exciting you'd devote your god to spamming them.

[K]

Big paths can make a difference on the battlefield. A Fire 9 Phoenix kills a lot more people with falling fires than a Fire 4 one. And once you get Flame Storm, it's nice to have a mage who can cast it 3 or 4 times in a row.

Vortex of Unlife is going to be devastating from a D9 caster, since it scales range, AoE, Damage, and spell penetration.

An Air 9 god can do Mists of Deception and Fog Warriors and Mass Flight all in the same fight. Also, Shimmering Fields really benefits from the damage scaling.

Army of Rats is a new N7! battlefield spell.

The problem is that it's just one caster, he can't do anything interesting until late-game, and he's got a target on his back. Between assassination spells and army-destroying spells like Earthquake, the actual number of battles where being a 9 actually means something is surprisingly small.

For example, I've never seen the AI or a human player cast Vortex of Unlife in Dom2, Dom3, or Dom4. The spell comes too late and it's too easy to kill the caster.

On a related note, Mists of Deception was only a great spell when it destroyed weak early and mid-game armies after the caster escaped. When it was nerfed, it became a spell that summoned super-weak chaff and distracted mages sometimes, and thus became really situational.

[K]

I just realized that nations like Agartha who can scry from a national site are perfect for figuring out which Thrones are the best ones to get in the early game.

Also, The Throne of Spendour is insane. It gives Blessed units Awe.

[K]

I feel like the Air Shield from a Air 9 Bless is not working.

[Ancient History]

Were you filled with arrows?

[K]

Were you filled with arrows?

I was using Air 9 on Kailasa and it didn't seem that there was an Air Shield at all.