Dominions 4 Teasers

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Sun Sep 15, 2013 5:24 pm

Yeah, from the looks of it you definitely need to hand it some real armor before sending it up against a mid-game enemy or any faction with native magic weapon access, like EA Atlantis or a Bless nation. Once you do that it should be pretty sturdy, thanks to native Awe. I mean, unlike your usual start-of-game SC pretender chassis, the Virtue actually has the ability to wear magic stuff.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Mon Sep 16, 2013 3:39 am

Quicken Self makes a huge difference when it means twice as much ice breath per round. A properly buffed blue dragon is scary. What's even better is that this trick should work nearly as well with a regular dragon SC.

Fire Shield might be nice on a red dragon too, but I like the sheer number of attacks my current god is throwing out.

Korwin · Post by **Korwin** » Mon Sep 16, 2013 5:31 am

Avoraciopoctules wrote:
Korwin wrote:I like Virtue as Disciple too.
Yeah, it's got great thugging paths and full item slots, so it starts as a nice SC and continues to get better as the game progresses. Magic weapons will mess it up, though. They cut through both Invulnerability and Mistform, I think.

The good part is, Ur can take the Virtue as an Disciple

K · Post by K » Mon Sep 16, 2013 10:05 am

Two things:

-Blood Feast only seems to only heal three afflictions, or it requires a second use for Never-healing Wounds. One or the other.

-Disciples use the Pretender nation's dom, even the special effects. This means that you can have your Pretender be Ashen Empire and then have Bandar Log get masses of undead freespawn and popkill dominion.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Sep 16, 2013 11:41 am

Does that mean that if Rlyeh is the leader, that all the land disciples get bonus freespawn for having "moved" to the land? That's probably the winner, if so. Your main god can hide under water and your disciple factions get a bunch of hybrid freespawn on the coasts to go with their awake SC dragons.

-Username17

Korwin · Post by **Korwin** » Mon Sep 16, 2013 12:57 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:Does that mean that if Rlyeh is the leader, that all the land disciples get bonus freespawn for having "moved" to the land? That's probably the winner, if so. Your main god can hide under water and your disciple factions get a bunch of hybrid freespawn on the coasts to go with their awake SC dragons.

-Username17

MA R'leyh? Testet it. Disciples of R'leyh dont get freespawn.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Mon Sep 16, 2013 1:08 pm

I don't think MA R'leyh has dominion freespawn, so that's hardly unexpected.

Ashen Empire and Lemuria are screwed in disciple games, then. They're dependent on their dominion effects for their armies, and if they are the pretender then their allies will be badly hampered in creating mages. LA R'leyh and the swamp version of C'tis (is that just MA or is it also EA?) will make alright disciples, just out some special bonuses. Heck, C'tis will balance out losing their edge with safely recruiting indie mages. But as pretenders, they'll either drive their allied troops insane or disease them all, so probably not a good idea.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Sep 16, 2013 2:15 pm

As I understand it, Ashen Fields is awesome in a Disciples game. You are required by law to have only disciples who have cheap undead leaders and cheap researchers, but since such nations do exist, you're golden. But Machaka, Ashpodel, Jotunheim, and Shinuyama all fit the bill. Basically you're playing three simultaneous positions of Ashen Fields, but one of them can make leaders for gems and the others can make leaders for gold. You'll need to trade resources a lot.

-Username17

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Mon Sep 16, 2013 4:29 pm

I recently had a game where I encountered the Steel Oven. It works the same as it did in Dom3, reducing gem costs on forging (and construction rituals) by 20%. Forge bonuses apply after the reduction (so an item that costs 15 earth gems will cost a baseline of 12, which is reduced to 10 with a Dwarven Hammer).

I was playing as LA Man at the time, so I don't know how many gems a unit with a Forge Bonus of 4 (Master Smith or Forge Lord w/Dwarven Hammer) pays for a 5-gem item at a Steel Oven. Is it 0 (5 -20% = 4 - 4 = 0) or is there a minimum cost of 1 gem, regardless?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Sep 16, 2013 4:38 pm

in dominions 3, percentile cost reduction could actually get to over 100% by various means. Nevertheless, the minimum cost for forging a magic item was 1 per path cost. So even as a Nataraja with both artifact hammers sitting on the steel ovens with Forge of the Ancients running, you still paid 1 gem for a pendant of luck and 3 gems for a cloak of the sea.

-Username17

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Mon Sep 16, 2013 4:48 pm

I don't know how to feel about the *other* forge bonus; the one where you get +X to all the paths you have at least 1 in for the purposes of forging.

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Mon Sep 16, 2013 4:58 pm

angelfromanotherpin wrote:I don't know how to feel about the *other* forge bonus; the one where you get +X to all the paths you have at least 1 in for the purposes of forging.

Doesn't that only exist on the Forge Lord? Even the other forge discount pretenders don't get that. It seems fine to me; the Forge Lord is kind of a lame duck since forge discounts got neutered. However, you might be able to save on design points by giving the Forge Lord F3, A3, S4 or whatever else, when all you really want is a caster who can forge those crucial path boosters that are out of reach of your national mages.

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Mon Sep 16, 2013 8:11 pm

So there's an item called the Bronze Arm, or something to that effect, which is available at Construction-6 and requires E3F1 to forge (15 earth gems, 5 fire). It's a cursed item that takes up a misc. slot and gives you an extra hand slot; in effect you're paying 20 gems to permanently convert a misc. to a hand slot. That's interesting, but conventional wisdom is that misc. slots are as important, if not more so, than hand slots, especially if what you're dealing with has two to begin with. Of course, the comedic value of giving your monolith a single beefy arm like Trogdor should not be understated, so this item already justifies it's existence that way.

That said, is shield-stacking effective in Dom4? If you had something important that had 3 or 4 hands, it could hold 1 weapon and then 2 or 3 shields. Actually, is giving something like a Nataraja 1-2 weapons and 2-3 shields a viable idea in the early-mid game? If the chance of parrying stacks, wouldn't 3 good shields be just about as effective, if not more, at providing protection as wearing heavy armor? Just a thought...

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Mon Sep 16, 2013 11:18 pm

Conventional wisdom is that the most important thing on a shield is an effect rather than straight up parry chance. But still, stacking Vine shield + Gleaming Gold + Frost Brand seems decent. Swapping a misc slot for a hand slot lets you alter the effect loadout if you really need to. Not a default but something to remember for that time you really need Awe on a Thug and both your hands are full.

K · Post by K » Mon Sep 16, 2013 11:58 pm

It's very hard to argue that your Misc. slots should not have a Dancing shield and that affliction prevention item. That being said, rocking a two-handed weapon and a shield is pretty solid.

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Tue Sep 17, 2013 7:21 pm

Is the Imp Familiar worth it? The Imp Familiar is a construction-0 or construction-2 (I forget which exactly), B1 cursed misc. item that gives +3 research, risks horror-marking the commander, and summons a single imp at the start of combat. The point behind it is as a research booster, and I'm wondering if it does or doesn't bear massing.

You can think of it as a half-strength owl quill (the horror-marking and imp summon are fringe concerns), but it costs you comparatively cheap blood slaves instead of the more valuable air gems. Is it worth handing out pet demons to your EA/LA Mictlan Priest lab-jockeys? It'd sure boost your research (it pays for itself mage-turn-wise after 3 turns, everything after that is pure profit) but it would cut in to the stockpile of blood slaves you're accumulating.

Thoughts?

K · Post by K » Tue Sep 17, 2013 8:59 pm

Shatner wrote:Is the Imp Familiar worth it? The Imp Familiar is a construction-0 or construction-2 (I forget which exactly), B1 cursed misc. item that gives +3 research, risks horror-marking the commander, and summons a single imp at the start of combat. The point behind it is as a research booster, and I'm wondering if it does or doesn't bear massing.

You can think of it as a half-strength owl quill (the horror-marking and imp summon are fringe concerns), but it costs you comparatively cheap blood slaves instead of the more valuable air gems. Is it worth handing out pet demons to your EA/LA Mictlan Priest lab-jockeys? It'd sure boost your research (it pays for itself mage-turn-wise after 3 turns, everything after that is pure profit) but it would cut in to the stockpile of blood slaves you're accumulating.

Thoughts?

I guess it all comes down to how quickly it kills you and how much trouble you are having with blood hunting.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Wed Sep 18, 2013 7:38 pm

The horror marking looks pretty insignificant. How quickly it pays for itself depends on your magic scale, of course. And it might be easier to think of the blood slaves in terms of the opportunity cost in research time? If it takes 2 or 3 turns of blood hunting, and if you're running a magic scale, it could seriously be half a year before you are ahead on research, setting aside the cost in gold and other blood options.

K · Post by K » Thu Sep 19, 2013 6:11 am

Orion wrote:The horror marking looks pretty insignificant. How quickly it pays for itself depends on your magic scale, of course. And it might be easier to think of the blood slaves in terms of the opportunity cost in research time? If it takes 2 or 3 turns of blood hunting, and if you're running a magic scale, it could seriously be half a year before you are ahead on research, setting aside the cost in gold and other blood options.

The new Horrors are also no bullshit. You are seriously trading off some research now for a dead mage later.

You need to take that into account losing slaves and mage turns now for some research profit later and research loss much later.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Thu Sep 19, 2013 1:30 pm

Someone did the calculation for Lightless Lanterns; average lifetime was something like 50 turns. For an item you will slap on your cheapest and worst mage, it's barely worth considering.

I'd say its value is proportional to how much non-blood magic you want to use, since all blood magic is on a single path and thus requires less research as well as needing slaves.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Thu Sep 19, 2013 3:41 pm

The spell description for Returning suggests that it comes with risks now, so escaping horrors is no longer trivial for astral mages.

Korwin · Post by **Korwin** » Fri Sep 20, 2013 5:14 am

Fleur Bleu wrote: So I tested archers against the blood9 bless.
I had about a hundred jags guarding a commander and a couple of hundred archers with flaming arrows shooting them.
All casualties are from blood vengeance.
This is with mr9 bakemono.

And mr 10 bandits.

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Fri Sep 20, 2013 6:08 am

So did battlefield evocations just lose some power? Ramping up a communion to drop large Falling Fires seems pretty dangerous now that hitting any Blood Blessed sacreds will kill all your best mages.

K · Post by K » Fri Sep 20, 2013 8:15 am

Red_Rob wrote:So did battlefield evocations just lose some power? Ramping up a communion to drop large Falling Fires seems pretty dangerous now that hitting any Blood Blessed sacreds will kill all your best mages.

The difference between a MR 9 Bakemono and a MR 18 mage is pretty considerable. That gap geta even bigger when you consider that mages will have every reason to put on a few MR items when they are fighting a Blood9 Bless.

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Fri Sep 20, 2013 9:38 am

Is the reflected damage considered the same as the damage dealt? So could a mage dropping Falling Fires grab a Ring of Fire Restistance to mitigate any blowback?