Dominions 4 Teasers

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K
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Post by K »

In other news, I found a command in the Wish spell to kill enemy pretenders.
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Avoraciopoctules
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

Do they get an MR check?
K
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Post by K »

Avoraciopoctules wrote:Do they get an MR check?
Yes and no. They get hit by "lightning," "1000 spears," and something that sounds like a Soul Slay. The latter seems to get a MR check.

I had some titans survive quite easily, but I imagine smaller Pretenders are boned.
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Post by Korwin »

K wrote:In other news, I found a command in the Wish spell to kill enemy pretenders.
Kill 'name of pretender'?
Red_Rob wrote: I mean, I'm pretty sure the Mayans had a prophecy about what would happen if Frank and PL ever agreed on something. PL will argue with Frank that the sky is blue or grass is green, so when they both separately piss on your idea that is definitely something to think about.
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Longes
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Post by Longes »

Shatner wrote:First off, those aren't good nations to start out with because they invert and/or discard most of the conventions the other nations play by.

In both nations you don't recruit troops or commanders. Instead, your dominion is highly, HIGHLY lethal, and will kill a swath of the population every turn, and some number of those dead will rise up as undead to join your ranks. This generates you a bunch of mostly-crappy but totally free zombies and skeletons and what-not that have all the advantages and disadvantages of being undead (e.g. inexhaustible, unaffected by cold or poison, unaffected by darkness, highly susceptible to priests casting Banishment). You will get free commanders, but they'll be minor priests or generals who're primarily there to march your zombie hordes around the map. You are playing as an all-consume locust nation which must expand into the lands of the living to fuel your war machine of the dead.

All of your good commanders need to be summoned with death magic. As such, you are required by law to have an Awake pretender with mid-to-high skill in Death magic. While other nations build forts and spend gold to produce mages, you have mages summon more mages. Since death gems are harder to come by then gold, since you're spending mage-turns generating more mages, and since these summons are a bit more expensive than they should be, you'll have fewer mages than the other, conventional nations, putting you behind in both research and battlefield support.

Now, you ARE getting gold from your provinces, at least until the last of the population dies off, and you will be spending this gold on building forts, and temples because the undead that spawn for free is BETTER when it spawns in a province with a fort and/or temple, and because your main weapon is your Dominion which is spread by your temples.

Because your empire is a literal lifeless hellscape populated by beings that don't eat, require forged equipment, or need payment, there is no reason for you to waste design points on scales that increase gold income, resources, or population growth (your dominion will kill the population an order of magnitude faster than even Growth-3 can restore it). Therefore you're required by law to have Turmoil-3, Death-3, Cold-3, and Sloth-3. Since you're chronically behind in mage-count, Magic-3 helps keep your research from getting too behind. Furthermore, random events will be the only source of income (and a welcomed source of gems) once your provinces have all been emptied of tax payers, so Luck-3 is also always taken. This has the nice side effect of making invading you a logistical hurdle because there'll be little-to-no supplies for the invading army to eat, and the extreme cold can increase the fatigue enemy troops and mages incur in combat. As stated earlier, your Dominion is your main weapon, so having a really high starting Dominion (usually 9 or 10) is strongly encouraged.

You can expand pretty quickly; skeletons and ghosts take down most indies pretty well, and you'll never be short on reinforcements. Playing against the AI you'll dominate the map with breathless ease because the AI doesn't know how to keep its armies fed when invading you and doesn't know how to deal with gigantic armies of undead.

However, rival human players can and will exploit the wide number of undead-counters out there, can manage to keep their armies from starving to death while attacking you, and will almost certainly unify against you ASAP because your ever-spreading dominion is killing the world that they hope to conquer. Playing as either nation in MP is incredibly hard, bordering on suicide.

MA Ermor is all zombies and skeletons. LA Ermor is all ghosts. The ghosts are ethereal so 3 of every 4 non-magical attacks (i.e. most attacks in the game) will do nothing. Also, your ghosts are very effective against underwater indies and have no problem moving in and out of the water. However, their weapons are very, very shitty so they have a hard time actually killing stuff. Also, the Late Era has three nations with rank-and-file troops holding magical weapons (Atlantis, Caelum, Ragha) who murder ghosts with embarrassing ease. Atlantis will also follow you underwater, destroy you utterly, and do a happy dance when they steal your massive death income for their own use. If I had to play one, I'd stick with MA Ermor.

Edit: Also, remember that all those gems you're getting that you have no real use for (i.e. not death or astral gems) can be converted into astral gems, and astral gems can be converted into death gems. Fire and Earth gems can be fed to alchemy spells to produce more gold. None of these conversion rates are particularly good, but if you have a pile of fire gems doing literally nothing, than trading them at any price for something you CAN use is a net gain.
Ok, thanks. What about MA Sceleria?
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Post by K »

Korwin wrote:
K wrote:In other news, I found a command in the Wish spell to kill enemy pretenders.
Kill 'name of pretender'?
Kill <nationname> pretender

So typing in "kill Abysia pretender" brings down the hate on Abysia's pretender wherever they are.
Shatner
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Post by Shatner »

Longes wrote:Ok, thanks. What about MA Sceleria?
Imagine a continuum between Roman star gazers and Roman zombie apocalypse. On the one side is Pythium with just living troops, hard-on for communions, and a bunch of astral summons. On the other you have MA Ermor which is all zombies all the time, the living need not apply. In the middle you have MA Sceleria, who got chocolate legionnaires on their peanut butter undead horde.

Points about Sceleria:
1) All of your priests can animate and lead the dead. This turns every indie god-botherer into an unending skeleton factory. Better priests can animate better and/or more undead, with your H3s getting you those pimp undead horsemen. You also get access to a bunch of special holy-based undead buffs, which give your non-H3 priests something to do in combat. In other words, Sceleria can do that freespawn pyramid scheme thing where each priest-recruitment center recruits commanders that recruit 0-upkeep troops, turning your linear commander-recruitment growth into geometric freespawn growth.

2) You have roman legionnaires, and those are pretty pimp. They hold a line beautifully, those towershields shrug off missile weapons, and all of them have javelins. They expand well against indies and you get a respectable unit for the price, even if their damage output is kinda meh. A line of towershields and a bunch of skeletons flanking will serve you well against armies without magic support. Oh, and the legionnaires certainly appreciate having soulless out front to eat the lance strikes and/or fireballs.

3) Your mages suck until you get communions and some research, then they are good. Pythium still does the communion thing better than you, but there are a number of things having death magic and lots of undead open up to compensate. Shadow Blast is an amazing spell and scales beautifully, three or four volleys of that can wreck the enemy line. You are uniquely equipped to spam Nether Bolt and Nether Darts, which add some nice, low-fatigue bombardment options. You can do the "horror mark + Lammashtas" gimmick to do some scorched earth, "nobody wins but you lose more" fighting. Plus all those goodies like Darkness, Rigor Mortis, Grip of Winter, Wailing Wind, and Wind of Death show up. Oh, and good ol' fashioned skelespam, should that be a thing you want to do. Plus, communioning up those H2s and H3s up to H5+ lets you cast some nice battlefield buffs for the living and undead alike.

4) Since you'll be diverting considerable resources into churning out priests to reanimate stuff, and since you need to use priests and/or death mages to lead your undead troops, you'll be behind on research. Possibly very behind. Also, you aren't good at forging owl quills or lightless lanterns. You can forge skull mentors but you probably shouldn't: they are expensive, late to show up, and cost a valuable gem type (death) instead of a cheap gem type (fire). If you really want to spend death gems speeding up your research, spam Revenants. As such, you're pretty reliant on magic scales to keep up with research.

5) Lictors are unimpressive as sacreds go, but Shadow Vestals are interesting. They are ethereal undead with a magic spear, a shield and absolutely no armor. High defense + shield + ethereal means they'll ignore most attacks, but those that do hit will murder them. However, used right they can expand well against indies, and they only get nastier once all your undead force multipliers kick in (unholy buffs, darkness, etc.). They aren't worth a major bless, but if you happen to pick up a smattering of minor blesses from your pretender, the vestals will put them to good use.

5) You have recruitable H3s (who can teleport, no less!) so you are free to take an immobile pretender and not hate yourself come Year 2. Your cap-only mages are old but very valuable (and expensive) so you'll either want growth OR you'll want to take the Titan of Serpents and Medicine (who will cure the disease affliction). Get her and you can even dabble in taking death scales, which are awfully thematic. Your gold needs aren't as great as other nations, what with the sacred lab rats, freespawn, and gold-efficient-but-high-resource legionnaires, so going Turmoil+Luck+Magic is a reasonable course of action. If you go death, luck+magic unlocks a number of death gem generating events, as well as some nice "a prince dies of the plague leaving you his fortune" gold events.


Early on those undead and legionnaires are pretty effective and very cheap. However, both die to massed evocations (and banishment spam sucks hard for you). You get to be cool again once you research Antimagic + Darkness, but it's a long wait to Alteration-6, so you need to play carefully in that middle period. For the really important battles, teleport a bunch of your Grand Thaumaturges over to step up the communion'd bombardment. Oh, and the A1s can spam Thunderstrike or cast Storm to nullify enemy fliers, archers, and drop enemy precision... combine with Darkness to really tank enemy effectiveness. Oh yeah, and Vengeance of the Dead will be your Mind Hunt. You can cast it easily and any thug or SC with a reasonable kill count will die to the spell if they fail the MR. Combine with an eye of the void and a spell focus (and a rune smasher if you can somehow get one) for optimal effect.
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Post by name_here »

Those Holy buffs are a pretty big deal; at Holy 3 you get a battlefield-wide +4MR spell, meaning that banishment spam doesn't punish you for massed undead quite as badly as everyone else. Also, the undead horsemen are seriously sweet; they've got lances, which get some form of damage bonus based on how far the user moved and can really brutalize whatever you hit on the initial charge.
DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.
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Avoraciopoctules
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

Any tips on fighting LA C'tis with T'ien Ch'i? I've got a dormant celestial general who's going to do a fair amount of site-searching once he wakes, and am hoping to deploy flying raiders in the midgame.
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Post by K »

LA Tien Chi has some nice archers and decent Earth magic with the Ancestor Smiths. Throw down some Earth Melds and Destructions and add archers and you should do pretty well. Flavor big battles with Curse of Stones if you can make some Earth Boots and you could compound LA C'tis's fatigue problems to epic levels.

Too bad you make shit Priests. Communion up your Astral/Holy mages for mad Holy to smack down on any undead spam he might do or just run in with a pile of H1 indies.
Last edited by K on Sat Oct 04, 2014 6:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
Ikeren
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Post by Ikeren »

I'm interested in playing a game, but I am both not very good and not very competent. Given this, is anyone interested in getting a game going here?
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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Yeah, it's been a while. I'm in.
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Post by Hicks »

As am I. I haven't played any nation except LA Lemuria, but would down for MA Ermor.
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Shatner
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Post by Shatner »

Hicks wrote:As am I. I haven't played any nation except LA Lemuria, but would down for MA Ermor.
Glutton for punishment, this one. :tongue:
Last edited by Shatner on Fri Oct 24, 2014 8:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Hicks »

I make a better ally than a conqueror. Lemuria/Ermor wants enemy dominion in their provinces to make any money, and can supply wave after wave of free spawn chaff to soften up entrenched enemies.
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Post by name_here »

I'm in. I'm thinking Arco, I have this sudden urge to have a lot of nature and holy available.
DSMatticus wrote:It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.
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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

I think we should take the recruiting talk to its own thread.
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Post by Ikeren »

Any good ways to get under water without Air or Water on your docket?
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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

If you don't have any amphibious indies, you can use Death. A Mound King is dirt cheap and can lead a big pile of undead beneath the waves.
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Avoraciopoctules
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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

Some cool heroes in the new patch
http://i.imgur.com/zztk2pc.png
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angelfromanotherpin
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Pretenders now passively Divine Blessing every combat round, which I approve of. New mod commands are nice, too.
Shatner
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Post by Shatner »

Plus swarming bat people! The three Xibalbas are pretty interesting.
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Post by K »

The Nazca are just really nice. Most of their mages get a second life as a mummy even if they die outside of dominion and those mummies get Inate Caster 2 (so they cast two spells a turn on top of being able to attack). This gives them a large number of recruitable undead priests for undead reanimation who also get bonuses to reanimation.

The EA bats are just fucking insane. They get recruitable Onaqui, so we are talking about sacred beastbat spam on an epic scale.
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Post by Shatner »

Not to mention that EA/LA Xibalba are almost certainly the new best blood hunting nations in the game. Recruitable, sacred B1s and B2s which also have an innate +1 dowsing bonus is huge. That they have gobs of flying priests as well as ample death and blood magic means they'll have no trouble summoning tons of flying sacreds and then leading and blessing those sacreds as they zip around the map.

Also, good access to the Blood-Earth for Demon Knights (who love those soul-blessing spells) and Blood Stones.
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Post by Red_Rob »

K wrote:The Nazca are just really nice. Most of their mages get a second life as a mummy even if they die outside of dominion and those mummies get Innate Caster 2 (so they cast two spells a turn on top of being able to attack).
Is Innate caster still broken so it only reads every other order and casts random crap inbetween? That could severely hamper it's usefulness. I'd rather have 5 guaranteed spells 1/turn than only 3 and a bunch of useless buffs and flying shards.

Xibalba looks pretty fun, particularly the EA version. Those Onaqui are Slow to Recruit which could hamper a bat swarm strategy, is the Beast Bat summoning a Domsummon or just a 1/turn thing? Flying horde spam seems like a theme of both these nations, the official forum is currently buzzing about Supaya reanimation being broken due to ramping up to hundreds of ethereal flying sacreds per turn by the mid game.

Personally I'm waiting for the Event Modding guide. There just seems to be so much you can do with mod commands now for this game it's crazy. Between nation restricted items, items keyed to certain units, xpshapes and now event modding you could really do some interesting stuff. I've been thinking of doing a "National Artifacts" mod that adds unique Artifacts for each of the nations. There seems to be a general consensus that Artifacts aren't worth the research or gems required, so you could really go to town with some crazy and flavourful stuff to make Const8 worthwhile whilst giving each nation something unique. I'd also like to see more of the new mechanics propagated to the older nations - foreignrec, national items, nation specific events and such.

Suffice to say I'm pretty excited by the recent updates!
Simplified Tome Armor.

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