The Gaming Den

Well, Sceleria joins the battle against the lizardfolk. Hopefully a second front will take some of the pressure off.

Third Front! The divine sisterhood are still bravely resisting the foul smelling invaders.

Peeeeeeer Presssssure.

Hey guys, I have picked up this year's flu, and it sucks. I have slept through the last two turn deadlines, and can't be sure I won't sleep through more. I think you'd better try to find a sub for me.

Okay, I just postponed hosting for 72h. I'll post looking for a sub tomorrow morning, unless anyone on the den wants to jump in.

So no sub has stepped forward and I don't have time to recruit one, this week is very bad for me.

Unless I hear an objection, I'm going to set Sceleria to AI.

I’m a little disappointed that I won’t be able to carve out a piece of Sceleria. The one province I border with them is a river that is not going to freeze, and it seems to contain the bulk of their army.

This is going to completely ruin my backstabbing C'Tis plan. Ugh.

The zombie remnants of Sceleria's empire are knocking at my door. I guess that river froze over.

So is anyone winning?

I'm sure not.

I think pythium and, especially, sceleria are winning. So... yeah.

Having two of the biggest and strongest players go AI, while everyone else focuses on humans rather than them, has not lead to a good gamestate for the human players.

I'm sort of reduced at this point - not playing to win at this point so much as to not let any other human player win either.

My perspective on events.

- I expanded way too much for a C'tis with a scales build and imprisoned scales pretender, and was a fairly big / dominant nation before anything went down. At least part of this was because I got super lucky with a Ringwall event on like turn 6, right in a perfect spot for a fort.
- I saw Man in a weak position having some skirmishes with Marignon, and I decided to take him out of the game before mid/lategame Air Magic stuff came online. I was wildly successful at this endeavor, but it freaked out every other player.
- Everyone else in the game (except Bandar Log, for whom it would be impractical) immediately recognized me as a threat and decided to attack me, regardless of if they could actually pull off a reasonable attack, regardless of how much other players were open to attack while they were attacking me. So it's like 3v1 people fighting me for a long time (I pretty much neutralize Man around the time Marignon declares war...).
- Pretty much nobody attacking me had AOE poison resistance for their guys when they attacked me, so they all died to Foul Vapors, Howl, Hordes of Skeletons. However, I slowly lost all my troops and many mages putting out fires around my entire empire, losing ground everywhere in a series of pyrrhic victories for my enemies.
- Everyone was so focused on me that they didn't prepare or defend against anything else, and people going AI were widely ignored by remaining players.
- AI pythium (to a small extent) and Sceleria (to a much larger extent), are eating the world now, because everyone else lost most everything else.

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In other Dominions 5 news, I am playing as Berytos in a game that's getting Let's Played by another player via youtube video currently. I really enjoyed watching his most recent turns.

The video series starts here and the most recent turn, which I have been laughing about all day, is here, or skip to 30:30 for the highlight.

He had two thrones to go to win the game, and had knocked down both walls instantly with Gate Cleavers and stealth attacks from surrounding provinces. If he took down the thrones with successful Storms he could have claimed thrones next turn, and won the game before anyone would stop him. Neither of the thrones he was besieging were mine, and nor was I even that close to the provinces in question. I sent the largest magic phase attack I have ever managed into one of the two provinces, from 5+ provs away, and won the battle decisively with near-total surprise - Stygian Paths a Devil / Storm Demon army and 22x Cloud Trapeze Stormcallers came from nowhere to the fort

My perspective on it:
-My bless was really stupid, and I should have went with my original plan of Awe and more Productivity. The entire point was to build cheap awe+fear thugs out of paladins, and getting the awe from the bless and the fear from a mercybrand would have been way smarter than getting fear from a bless and awe from expensive shields. Also, not being resource-capped in the early game would have made my expansion better.
-I had a sage recruitment site in my cap circle, and I am the perfect nation for lightless lantern spam. I almost certainly had the best research in the game, I just didn't acquire the territory or (especially) the gems to leverage it. Which was my own damn fault, because of point #1.
-Man decided to pick a fight with me year one by snagging a province in my cap circle and demanding money to return it. I decided to call his bluff, then attempt to low key Dom-kill him. C'tis senses weakness and goes in for the kill, grabbing most of the territory I was hoping to take by Dom-killing Man.
-Scleria offered to team up with me to take out C'tis. I agreed to that (planning to stick to Harbinger raids and arouse hunger spam while Scleria's undead did the army crushing), but this Scleria went AI and the entire plan fell through, leaving me in a fight with a very big C'tis and no real way to deal with Foul Vapours.
-Harbinger thugs are great, but disease dominion wrecks them.

Awe+Fear was way better in earlier versions of Dominions. Fear is just really disappointing now, compared to how it once was - overlapping fear auras basically do nothing instead of basically instantly winning.

I believe that's because squads now have a "survivor" secret bonus (only mentioned in the manual) to morale that starts at like +5 and only goes down when the squad suffers actual casualities, so routing unharmed units just with fear effects is much, much harder.

Mind you, retreating units now have a chance of running to an enemy province and auto-dying even if there are friendly provinces nearby, so making armies run away is a lot more brutal than before.

GreatGreyShrike wrote:Awe+Fear was way better in earlier versions of Dominions. Fear is just really disappointing now, compared to how it once was - overlapping fear auras basically do nothing instead of basically instantly winning.

Fear's still a morale penalty, and Awe still means a morale check to hit. Sure, it doesn't give you an offense, but that's what having two attacks (sword+hoof) is for. And what knights of the chalice are for. (They also get awe and also benefit from the fear aura if they stay near their leader.)

For my part I had a fairly lacklustre expansion, probably the result of not having done enough testing with Dom5 and Man specifically. After taking a well defended province that ended up being worth ~60 gold/month I found it was in Marignons cap circle, not only meaning I would need to give it up but also blocking off further expansion in that area and leading to wasted expansion time backtracking.

To try to recoup some of the lost time and troops I asked for my default 3 months income to hand the province to Mari, but they weren't in the mood for negotiating and just took it. More fool me for not dumping a load of PD in there to protect my investment I guess. From this and the bless I'd seen on their Flags I got the feeling Mari was on the hunt for an early target, so I started moving troops over to that side of my empire.

Sure enough, Mari attacked, however as their armies seemed to mainly consist of indy tribesmen I wasn't really worried. I spent a few months consolidating whilst I hit my research targets, then marched out an army and smashed their forces quite handily. However just as I was pushing into Mari's territory C'tis had moved across my undefended border, and their armies consisted of actual troops with mage support. By the time I'd pulled back they were at the Capital, and I didn't really have an answer to their Foul Vapours shenanigans.

The turn C'tis invaded I actually got the Circle master event, handing me 4 free Blood mages at an early stage of the game. If things had turned out differently it would have been fun trying MA Man Blood...

21 dead Marshmasters has to hurt.

Yeah. I am pretty much out of the game, now. There's not really much I can do from my present position.

EDIT:

Marignon is gone, so it's just me and bandar log. I'm willing to surrender, in lieu of playing the 'hope the AI decides to randomly smash into Bandar Log harder than me" game.

GreatGreyShrike wrote:Yeah. I am pretty much out of the game, now. There's not really much I can do from my present position.

EDIT:

Marignon is gone, so it's just me and bandar log. I'm willing to surrender, in lieu of playing the 'hope the AI decides to randomly smash into Bandar Log harder than me" game.

I'll accept that surrender. I'm not going to make you play the next 6-7 turns it would take me to take a 1-point throne.

So I'll do my recap:

I had a bad start with three -100% tax events in a row at my capital on turns 2, 3, and 4. I also ran into an early province with a couple of unexpected Blood mages who smashed one of my better early expansion armies with ten elephants.

Since I had the smallest territory, I focused on research. In my bried time with the Eyes of God, I can tell you that only Marignon had the same level of research. Everyone else had half or less.

I had a rainbow god, so I had good gem income for the whole game, but I also had a -30% enchantment site. I briefly had Earth Blood Deep Well up, and that was going to be my big assault plan because I'd be getting cheaper statues. Since my Earth income was 2, and I'd converted a lot of Astral to cast it the first time, I wasn't going to get it up a second time.

I basically played the waiting game until I had the magic necessary to take a Throne province near me that was full of Flame Snakes and other fire monsters and a Fire 6 monster Faux-tender. It took a while on the Enchantress casino to get a few with Fire because I had somehow forgotten that there was Water-based fire resistance magic available.

The only really satisfying battle was against C'tis for the Throne they were holding. Unfortunately, the Prophet who was supposed to claim that Throne for me was one of my 4 leader casualties in that battle, so I was going have to summon a Siddha for the H3.

Certainly, I could have failed with a rising Sceleria. Even as AI, they were attacking my lands from three sides with decently-sized armies of undead legionaires, and I did not have a lot of priests on hand to deal with that, so I was putting out fires all over my small empire. They had so much money that they increased the province defense on one of my provinces by like 50, meaning a real army had to be sent to take it back.

Lessions learned:

-Water has some fire resistance spells
-increase province defense or retreating mages from other battles will take your provinces.
-Misfortune is probably not the free points it was in Dom3/4.
-Bandar Log is fine without a good Bless.
-Must remember that archery sucks now.
-Don't attack C'tis without poison resistance.
-H3 or bust if you want to win by thrones.