Dominions 4 Teasers

Ikeren · Post by **Ikeren** » Wed Apr 02, 2014 6:46 pm

The best I got is to take and hold his land holdings to cripple him, make it obvious you can take and hold his land holdings, and then try to offer him a softer target, but dude, good luck.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Wed Apr 02, 2014 7:34 pm

Make sure you have an underwater plan before starting a war with underwater nations in the future. The shark spells are a huge deal underwater, so definitely get that. You also want Friendly Currents/the magic item that casts it at the start of battle.

Getting lots of troops underwater is honestly not something I know how to do. I think Air has some items that let you take a lot of troops underwater. There's also a water Global that allows everything to go underwater, but that's very high up the research tree and also a cruel practical joke.

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Wed Apr 02, 2014 8:02 pm

You mentioned you have an Enchantress site, and they have a 42% chance of getting W1. Crank out a few until you get one with at least W1, have that W1 forge a Water Ring, cast Water Power in combat and there's your W3.

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Wed Apr 02, 2014 10:05 pm

I already have a W1, a W2 and a W3 enchantress along with some Water bracelets. Sounds like I need to get Conjuration 6 researched before venturing underwater then. I was planning on forging a Wave Breaker anyway, I know that shit is tight, yo.

name_here wrote:Getting lots of troops underwater is honestly not something I know how to do. I think Air has some items that let you take a lot of troops underwater.

The manual doesn't mention it but there is a big penalty for airbreathing troops underwater even if they are given waterbreathing, so those items are basically a trap. Currently I'm looking at summoning up some Sea Trolls and Naiad warriors to establish a foothold, then recruiting some chaff underwater.

Although, of course, I don't really care about following R'lyeh underwater except to stop them from coming back at an inopportune moment. My aim with this war is to capture their Thrones, as I'm hoping that will put me into striking range of victory using the Mass Cloud Trapeze Sneak Attack strategy.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Thu Apr 03, 2014 6:13 am

I'm given to understand that Friendly Currents goes a long way towards mitigating the poor amphibian penalty.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Apr 03, 2014 1:25 pm

Poor amphibian penalty or no, most underwater troops are bullshit flavored garbage with carob chips. A Sea King's Goblet full of Einheres is better than most troops you'll meet under water. And if you back that shit up with a Wave Breaker and a Serpent's Blessing, you've got something better than Rlyehan national troops while under water.

-Username17

Gnosticism Is A Hoot · Thu Apr 03, 2014 6:51 pm

A long time ago I played some games of Dom3 here, and, to be blunt, I was utterly shit at it. Now I have Dom4, and I am making efforts to be less aggressively terrible.

So. I've been playing MA Pythium, and they seem to be set up for communions. I get the basic idea of communions - spread the fatigue cost of major spells, boost magic paths - but I don't know any specifics. Can anyone link me to a guide?

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Tue Apr 15, 2014 2:01 am

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Tue Apr 15, 2014 3:23 am

I'm naming mine Carpe Diem. It's actually a nice pretender for Jomon because they desperately want to get into the water quickly. Furthermore, with a tiny bit of research, some amount of water and astral will allow your titan to solo UW provinces.

Though not nearly as showy, the new Raksharani is a nice pretender for EA Lanka. A Nature-Death bless can make your sacreds nearly unkillable while having nice magic attacks, or a humble N4D5B4 gives a cheap-but-effective smattering of bonuses, a useful caster/booster-forger, while allowing you to afford scales.

EDIT: Oh, and this wasn't included in the changelog, but EA Kailasa got a new commander that neatly solves their awful leadership problem. The Guhyaka General is an H1 with 80 mundane leadership and 40 magical leadership, so you can finally lead and bless your sacreds with one MM-2 commander. Also makes for a reasonable thug chassis.

K · Post by K » Wed Apr 16, 2014 5:59 am

Gnosticism Is A Hoot wrote:A long time ago I played some games of Dom3 here, and, to be blunt, I was utterly shit at it. Now I have Dom4, and I am making efforts to be less aggressively terrible.

So. I've been playing MA Pythium, and they seem to be set up for communions. I get the basic idea of communions - spread the fatigue cost of major spells, boost magic paths - but I don't know any specifics. Can anyone link me to a guide?

I don't really know where a guide might be, but here are the relevant facts:

1. Communion slaves don't get to cast spells. They just get a share of the fatigue a Master would get from cast spells plus their own encumbrance for each spell cast by a Master (this means taking fatigue from each Master in each round).

2. Spells cast by the Master that normally target only the caster also target all slaves even if they can't normally cast those spells. Spells like Earth Power or Mistform are excellent for this purpose. Avoid Hellpower. The Blood spell Reinvigoration removes fatigue from all slaves and it is very nice.

3. Blood Sabbaths are the exact same pair of spells except for costs and paths and are interchangeable. This means you can have three slaves casting Communion Slave being led by a Sabbath Master.

4. Crystal Matrixes and Slave Matrixes cast the associated spells on Round 0 and can be used by any mages. Undead are good because they often have a base Encumbrance of 0.

5. Communions are often used to cast lots of good spells as well as single big spells that affect the whole battlefield. Spells like Fog Warriors or Army of Lead are the kinds of things you want to do as well as spam of spells like Falling Fire/Frost.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Wed Apr 16, 2014 5:18 pm

The way fatigue and paths in a communion works is a bit complicated. The communion gives a bonus of (log base 2 (number of slaves)) to all paths for the masters, and the same value as a bonus to slaves for resisting fatigue from spells cast by the master. The base fatigue from casting a spell is evenly divided between the master and all slaves, then adjusted by the effective path level via a poorly-understood formula. This makes the fatigue smaller if you have a higher path level than needed and larger if you don't have a high enough one to cast it in the first place.

You might take this knowledge and elaborately calculate out exactly how many slaves you need to sustain a communion casting an array of spells, but there's all kinds of ways to get a bit more fatigue than expected and microwave your slaves, plus once five turns are up the masters go off-script and don't seem to account for slave fatigue. It's only worth calculating out the exact number and only bringing that if you're casting Master Enslave or something.

Personally, I usually go with a massive quantity of cheap slaves with S1 and have someone cast Summon Earthpower. When you've got over 16 slaves you're looking at a fairly impressive bonus to soak fatigue, splitting it many ways, and getting it removed by reinvigoration. Spamming anything with an AoE that has a + next to the number is generally pretty effective.

Gnosticism Is A Hoot · Wed Apr 16, 2014 6:02 pm

Thanks guys, that's very helpful. I hadn't thought about using communions to hit the high-level buffs, and I like the idea of fog warrior legionaries.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Apr 16, 2014 8:33 pm

There are a couple of main things to do with Communions. The first and most obvious is to power up a big caster to cast big battlefield spells. Who or what your slaves are doesn't really matter for this because you're only going to cast a couple of spells and the fatigue is going to be split like twenty different ways.

The second, and slightly less obvious is to have a medium number of slaves power up a medium number of masters into high gear to blast the fuck out of things. The second one requires slaves with very low encumbrance values because otherwise they will explode (Revenants with Slave Matrices are good for this, Theurge Communicants not so much).

The third, and least obvious of all is the "reverse communion." This uses the self-spell sharing mechanism to effectively cast more spells than you would normally be able to script. This is very hard to do, and this has no little to do with the fact that when the communion is running none of the slaves can act, and when the communion ends all the slaves pass out from fatigue. There are things you can do around that. You can use "suicide slaves" in that a Theurge Communicant gets all the benefits from, for example, Phoenix Pyre as soon as one of the masters casts it. Or you can have a couple of true bad asses as slaves, pump them full of twenty different buffs, have the masters run away, and then have the slaves wait until they wake up and then murder all the opposition. Doesn't take as long as you'd think if one of the buffs is Summon Earthpower and another is Soul Vortex.

-Username17

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Wed Apr 16, 2014 11:44 pm

Reverse communions got super-nerfed in Dom4, though, so sending a bunch of heavily buffed linebacker giants at the enemy is much less practical than it used to be.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Apr 17, 2014 4:36 am

Avoraciopoctules wrote:Reverse communions got super-nerfed in Dom4, though, so sending a bunch of heavily buffed linebacker giants at the enemy is much less practical than it used to be.

Yes and no. Yes, in that slaves can no longer move and attack during the communion if they have the right unit id numbers (which was a bug) and that slaves take a giant pile of fatigue when the last master leaves the field (which is a deliberate change). But no in that there are now some new really quite juicy buffs you can pump through a communion and also that since slaves won't move before they wake up you can guaranty that none of your linebackers will decide to charge into combat or fatigue themselves out with personal spellcasting before the buff routine is up.

I haven't heard of people doing much with reverse communion in Dominions 4. But having run the math a bit, it seems fairly viable for a sufficiently decadent late game Hinnom or Jotunheim. You need a lot of thugs, a bunch of blood slaves, and a diverse bunch of buff casters to make it worth it - but that is what the giant factions are supposed to bring to the party in the late game.

-Username17

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Thu Apr 17, 2014 6:18 pm

Thanks for the tip. I'll keep it in mind next time I'm messing around with late-game giants in single-player. On a tangentially related note, apparently some giant nations get upscaled skeletons from casting Reanimation as well as undead/demon prophets. It's almost enough to make one care about the pretenders with reanimation bonuses.

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Fri Apr 18, 2014 12:35 am

So the war against R'lyeh is proceeding well, they are down to around 6 land provinces and I have 3 of their forts under siege. In addition I claimed the Throne of Splendour for Awe blessed Valkyrie goodness. However it's not all roses, there are a couple of things causing me grief. Firstly, they have a Vastness that is currently leaping around battering any small armies and destroying unforted temples. How do you deal with a Vastness? Those things seem fucking unkillable outside Magic Duel. Does Blood Vengeance trigger from Curse of the Frog Prince? Hellbound heart? Are there any good ways to get round it?

Secondly, I just laid siege to a fort that was reported as having around 20 defenders "mostly consisting of Star Children". Is my besieging army going to have all it's commanders assassinated over the next few turns? I'm hoping to get someone in range to cast Crumble over the next couple of turns to shorten the siege, but is there anything I can do to lessen the impact of all the assassinations? Hiring a load of indie commanders to muddy the waters might pay off, but seems like it could be expensive.

Ikeren · Post by **Ikeren** » Sat Apr 19, 2014 6:21 pm

Put a bunch of troops on "guard commander" --- I think 5 will be brought in to defend the commander, that should be enough to kill his assassins, if you're troops are sufficiently non-shitty.

As for the vastness, try some thug and PD ambushes: find the next nearest untempled fort, and move a few thugs and even mages there and seriously put a real counter-force to stop him.

Note: I am at best mediocre at this game.

Red_Rob · Post by **Red_Rob** » Mon Apr 21, 2014 1:04 am

Thanks Ikeren, for some reason I was thinking that Guard Commander would stop the troops from sieging, but of course that's not the case. I put it down to this being the first time anyone has really used assassins against me.

Ikeren · Post by **Ikeren** » Mon Apr 21, 2014 2:33 am

Uh, I'd look that up, I don't know shit.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Mon Apr 21, 2014 2:37 am

It won't stop them from seiging. However, Star Children aren't your average assassins and depending on the vagaries of scripting and targeting might be able to kill your commanders before the guards kill them. I suggest going with indie commanders as decoys.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Wed Jul 30, 2014 8:02 pm

When a mage casts a communion spell they now get a little buff that says whether they are a Master or a Slave, how much the communion is boosting each path and how many slaves are in the communion.

Is this true? Maybe it's time to give Pythium a serious try if so.

Shatner · Post by **Shatner** » Wed Jul 30, 2014 8:15 pm

Yup, I've seen it in action with some Mictlan sabbaths/communions. Before the latest update you saw nothing, after it you get these handy icons that spell it all out. There's some nice refinements of the UI that've happened, and there's more on the way.

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Thu Jul 31, 2014 1:42 am

Here is the foolproof site search strategy:

- Conquer your cap circle only
- Rush for Acashic Knowledge
- Set it to cast monthly
- Only expand once you've searched every cap circle province, taking one province at a time and Knowledging each one

With this method you will guarantee the most sites possible with a minimum of time wasted. Try it today!
If you don't expand at all beyond the cap circle your entire army can respond instantly to aggression.

It's sort of prisoner's dilemma going on, though. If nobody site-searches, you don't get that benefit by attacking people. Like Aby doesn't appear to have searched for any fire sites at all in this game, maybe I'll just leave him alone next time because his lands aren't as well site-searched.
You find that out after you are occupying the land though and then go, "damn you."
WELL FUCK I GUESS ILL JUST GIVE ALL THIS LAND BACK

Avoraciopoctules · Post by **Avoraciopoctules** » Wed Aug 13, 2014 8:51 pm

From http://forums.somethingawful.com/showth ... genumber=1
http://i.imgur.com/dX7nIU2.gif