The Gaming Den

I can probably fit another game into my schedule.

The changelog includes a bunch of other changes, but the ones that most interest me are: • Attack rear now less reliable • Fix for ranged target prediction I haven't played since the update dropped, how noticeable are these? There is much gnashing of teeth by Caelum players that Attack Rear is no l...

As for Tough Skin vs Fortitude, Tough Skin seems a lot better to me. And not just because it saves you 48 design points. Let's consider the effects on a Fomorian Giant: It has 6 protection (all natural) on the face, and 16 protection (mixed) on the body. So Tough Skin saves you from 5 damage to the...

The typical bless chassis for all the sacred giant nations that can get it is the Thrice Horned Boar at E6N7 for Hard Skin and Regeneration. That gives you a very effective combat god (protection 27 in your dominion plus recuperation plus regeneration plus size 6 trample), and is an extremely effec...

Heavy Cavalry is an acceptable expansion strategy against pretty much everything. Any faction that has access to heavy cavalry automatically can be played with an imprisoned god and some productivity scales. Turns out lances weren't breaking and were being counted in every attack. That bug got fixe...

Flying units on attack rear seem to go after characters a lot more reliably. Yeah, I'm in a game with EA Arco and they have 15 provinces by turn 6. A single Wind Lord will hit the back line every time, and now they have H1 to self bless they can take most indies solo. It's egregious enough that we'...

I was musing earlier about using a strong air bless (which would allow you to purchase the precision boost effect numerous times) and easy access to Wind Guide to turn Gift from Heaven into a tactical nuke rather than a the meteorite-equivalent of spray-and-pray. Be aware that Gifts of Heaven has a...

Pikemen are worse than in Dom4 because they changed the repel rules back to the Dom3 version. Now only the target gets a chance to repel instead of everyone in the target square. I haven't really tried out bows yet, I've read some reports they are worse at targetting because of the real time combat,...

Pretenders can be discounted by up to 60 points for a particular nation, so really you don't want to have any that are cheaper than that. In Dom4 the Floating Mind was 50pts and 20 cheaper for Rlyeh, so 30 was the cheapest you could get. I can see wanting to leave some room at the bottom end for fut...

Something I pointed out in the beta is that "free" bless points are worth more the more points you put into the path. Getting a 6-point bless for 4 points saves you 72 points (starting from 1) whereas getting a 9-point bless for 7 points saves you 120 points, or 3 whole scales. This really...

Dominions 5 is out! Also on 10% discount for the first month (at least on the UK storefront).

I'm at work for another 8 hours, but I'll be picking it up when I get home.

I actually agree with a lot of your concerns Zine. However, given the 2 man Dev team and the fact they steadfastly refuse to hand even the boring donkey-work over to anyone else, I think we have to be resigned to incremental improvements rather than the ground-up redesign of the UI that is obviously...

Ancient History wrote:

For some reason this reminds me of nothing more than arriving in Bluetown in Crypts of Chaos.

Does Dominions really need formalised diplomacy options though? I haven't really noticed their absence. I know Den games tend to devolve into acrimony and finger pointing, but I thought that was just because we are all assholes ^_^

Some form of in-built trading system would be nice though.

New customizable bless effects:

Dominions 5 just got announced:

http://www.illwinter.com/dom5/

Current ETA is November, apparently a beta has been running for the last few months.

Looks like a much more radical rework than Dom3 > Dom4. Real time battles, changes to recruitment, design your own blesses...

Dominions is now 66% off in the Steam Sale:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/25906 ... Ascension/

In order to have a bless-optional nation you basically need an embarrassment of riches. Mictlan is pushed towards a bless because their non-sacred troops and their out of cap mages aren't anything special. Arco is pushed towards scales as their troops are resource heavy and their recruit-anywhere ma...

Thing is, Illwinter isn't adding new spells to a bunch of nations every couple months. But you keep doing it. You just did! If Illwinter has trouble reaching balance after 10 years while holding back on adding more magic willy-nilly, how exactly do you hope to reach any semblance of balance before ...

Magic Enhanced got an update to 1.45:

http://z7.invisionfree.com/Dom3mods/ind ... topic=2927

The reason MA Ulm is touted as a good beginner nation is they have good infantry and mages that can cast big aoe buffs and big aoe damage spells. That is pretty simple for a newbie to grasp, and you can do well just by forming your infantry into a block and having mages cast Strength of Giants, Legi...

Couldn't, you know, release the spells in small batches instead of "here's several hundreds of new spells dumped in one go, hope I didn't mess anything up"? Because by literally adding hundreds of new spells at once, simple statistics are that you're gonna mess up something big. The probl...

Of the 2 different games I played in multi with Magic Enhanced, one was totally wrecked by it, and another could have been randomly crashed by it but wasn't. My overall experience suggested an absence of any detailed playtesting of the mod, with the creator not doing any checking to make sure the s...

What other general sorts of formations do other people tend to find themselves using over and over again? A few notes about formations. Firstly, any squad in Line formation will only move a maximum of 3 squares per turn if set to "Attack" orders. If you set them to "Hold and attack&q...

virgil wrote: * Stress: Why is it stressful for a human to spend two days in a human community?

"Hell is other people" - Jean-Paul Sartre