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Am I missing something with LA Lemuria or do all of your reanimate choices suck? disembodied spirits, I've literally never seen get a single kill even when massed in the hundreds, so they're at best chaff. shades/shade soldiers, seem to get very few kills and are prone to getting banished even with Protection of the Shadelands Shade Beasts seem the most solid, but you can only summon 1 per turn with your disposable priests Apparitions rely on killing a hundred pop (not going to be possible in the long term for popkill dom), and on top of that just aren't great for the price paid.
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May 3, 2024 19:13
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they exist basically to make it hard to get to your mages
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May 3, 2024 19:30
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Arianya posted:Am I missing something with LA Lemuria or do all of your reanimate choices suck? Lemuria is in a very bad way in 6. I think they are a D tier nation. Spirit form changes are horrible for them, ghosts are even more garbage and they were garbage before. More expensive forts is horrible, the immortals are basically the only trick left. You can probably still beat AI with them but I would go all in on the super immortal mages in some way. I would actually recommend avoiding this nation for multiplayer period, you still have the hatred other players will have for popkill but no threat to waggle at them to keep them from the sweet sweet death gems prize of your capital.
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May 3, 2024 19:45
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MonsterEnvy posted:What’s a good MA Abysia pretender. I would recommend an imprisoned discount warlock guy whatever his name is with high paths in everything. Your choice of scales or hell bless, their sacreds aren't as good as EA but they can take a bless fine and be a big threat all game. I don't think they need the diversity early. Search out indie mages.
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May 3, 2024 19:48
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Agree with the imprisoned god suggestion, though I'd add that unaging is really useful for them, all their anyfort mages are old age when recruited and lack paths that make up for that. Other than unaging, just stack up on the non-incarnate blesses that make them tougher. For starters, enchanted blood and maxed out undying is a very good combo. Just don't waste your points on defense skill.
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May 3, 2024 20:12
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Probably bad advice from someone who's barely played in the last decade, but I like awake expanders with scales for resource-dependent nations without amazing sacred troops. Get huge, win your first war and try to fix your bad path diversity later with help from your new provinces. I think a mage bless is questionable because your communion/sabbath guys are nonsacred (and cap only) and your recruit anywhere sacred mages are almost always pure fire with e1 and a 10% chance at other stuff on the slow to recruit guys, fire evocation/elemental spam isn't bad by any means but your opponents will probably always mitigate fire as much as they can when fighting you, so in the long term I think it's better to focus on things your nonsacred mages can do For the chassis you still can't go wrong with a golden lion. It's probably a bit too good right now. I wouldn't blind expand with it but it will usually be fine blind expanding, and once it can cast personal regen + fire shield on itself it can solo huge armies of mundane troops very early in the game. Something like this:  (alternatively, sacrifice more scales for a regen bless so the lion+sacreds are harder to kill and you can put shrouds of the battle saint on communion slaves and your most precious diseased mages)It has invuln 25 and pierce / slash resist, so the counters to it are troops that defeat its invulnerability with magic weapons or do blunt damage, ideally both. Anakites will kill it, and high damage blunt weapons (ogres / trolls / some national troops) can do alright against it, but in general indies will never threaten it once you have enchantment 3 buffs. With map move 22 it's also very mobile for a non-flying unit, so until it gets afflicted with limp/cripple it can expand efficiently and show up where enemy players won't expect it to be. If you have 50 glamour gems to spare later in the game you can empower the lion in glamour so it can cast awe on itself (it comes with Fear +5) and faery trod, this can surprise other players and make you look very cool Flavahbeast fucked around with this message at 21:44 on May 3, 2024 |
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May 3, 2024 21:33
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EA Ur does really well with a cheap lion. With the extra gold and provinces, you can spam out a frankly ludicrous number of 16 gold foreign rec archers with 16 damage longbows, 17 damage daggers, and 24 hp, and grab >30 provinces with reasonable ease and be more than ready for a first war.
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May 3, 2024 21:46
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Spiking posted:Lemuria is in a very bad way in 6. I think they are a D tier nation. Spirit form changes are horrible for them, ghosts are even more garbage and they were garbage before. More expensive forts is horrible, the immortals are basically the only trick left. You can probably still beat AI with them but I would go all in on the super immortal mages in some way. I would actually recommend avoiding this nation for multiplayer period, you still have the hatred other players will have for popkill but no threat to waggle at them to keep them from the sweet sweet death gems prize of your capital. Yeah I wish Illwinter took care more of the balance with the changes they do. I know that by nature of the game, Dominions will never be a decently balanced game, but at least they could do the bare minimum. Like, if you change how your ethereal units work and how they are buffed (now they can't get prot from most spells), and you have a pair of nations with entire troop choice is ghosts, maybe try to compensate the change makes things cheaper or increasing the spawn rate or whatever.
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May 3, 2024 21:47
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Flavahbeast posted:(alternatively, sacrifice more scales for a regen bless so the lion+sacreds are harder to kill and you can put shrouds of the battle saint on communion slaves and your most precious diseased mages) worth noting that due to disease now debuffing your max hp regen doesnt really do anything against it anymore. side effect of this is that generally diseased guys take way longer to die now
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May 3, 2024 22:22
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Spiking posted:I would recommend an imprisoned discount warlock guy whatever his name is with high paths in everything. Your choice of scales or hell bless, their sacreds aren't as good as EA but they can take a bless fine and be a big threat all game. I don't think they need the diversity early. Search out indie mages. MA and LA Abysia do get a lot of points to play with if you do this route, don't be afraid to go death 3 - they only get half the downside for it, and there are some good death 3 events if you have luck
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May 3, 2024 22:35
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I don't think I would pick a hell bless / Imprisoned / Death 3 with MA Abysia. All those Pretender points and bad pop growth for what? Your sacreds are cap only, and they are just decent, not great (in comparison with other nations who have amazing sacreds). Their low defense will make the counterable by real players. You don't have good sacred summons, just the stupid Scorpion Man which is a meme. You don't have thugable sacred mages-commander either. So I would go for some good combat capable chassis or great magic diversity Pretender, together some decent-ish scales before going the hell bless/poo poo scales route.
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May 3, 2024 22:46
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Alternatively, something like this: at 17 hp and 3 defence and 7 encumbrance your lava warriors don't have a lot of staying power, but with a Luck bless they have to be killed an average of 4 times before they are killed, even if they take huge damage from something like an anakite. In the meantime they've gone berserk and are hitting twice a round for 23 damage, 26 in a heat 3 province, and are each spreading fire clouds to three tiles, which combined with fireball spam and eventually heat from hell can make huge patches of fire clouds that fatigue enemy armies very quickly. They're good enough without the incarnate bless to help expand, (have another squad of non-sacred abysians in front to catch arrows, especially since lava warriors will move faster than them in high heat provinces,) and once your god wakes up she can site search like a champ and make hammers for you and you'll have a army of 40+ Luck blessed lava warriors to complement your national troops, which I think will be pretty oppressive. Heat 4 + death 2 means population of your core territories will be scuffed going into late game though jsoh posted:worth noting that due to disease now debuffing your max hp regen doesnt really do anything against it anymore. side effect of this is that generally diseased guys take way longer to die now Oh, thats good to know. Does it still lower the chance of getting afflictions from disease ticks? Flavahbeast fucked around with this message at 00:20 on May 4, 2024 |
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May 3, 2024 22:49
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Flavahbeast posted:Alternatively, something like this: id be tempted to take fire 2 over air 2 since that gets you into skull of fire and staff of elemental mastery, but it would lose your air access here or at least make it much more expensive and hard to do. as well as having to empwoer god to cast wailing wind. and im pretttttty sure regen still cuts affliction chance yeah
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May 4, 2024 01:40
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So, uh, I have a single player game going as Ind, and I'm at war with Abysia, who have control of the caverns. I took a fire+solar weapons bless, which is, uh, totally useless against Abysia. I have Orinde and Picyone forts, and have done a fair amount of research. Right now I have them stuck on a fort at the tunnel up to my territory, but I just lost a big fight where I tried using Astral Fires and it took out half my cap-only mage recruitment for the entire game. I do have a bunch of S1 Ind sages for a communion, but I'm not sure what I can cast that beats Abysian infantry with astral, earth, and fire. Heeelllpppp. Oh, and is there any spell that illuminates the caverns?
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May 4, 2024 17:24
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presumably gifts from heaven, assuming it still works underground e: for damaging heavily armoured fire resistant troops, not for lighting up the battlefield
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May 4, 2024 17:31
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Inexplicable Humblebrag posted:presumably gifts from heaven, assuming it still works underground It does not. Am now looking at Alteration 4 for an armor destroying spell.
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May 4, 2024 17:36
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How did astral fires take out your own mages? If you can get together a W3 caster, then wolven winter will help neuter a lot of the heat-based effects that Abysia has going on - anything with fire power will be far weaker and heat clouds won't work as well. The scale change doesn't take effect until end of turn though, so it takes a turn to prep if you know a fight is coming. For earth, weapons of sharpness or the bigger AOE variants if you have the research are also a great way to get through heavy armor. Earth elementals are also very solid, especially if you can get a big communion going to use the living earth variant - they have enough protection to not get immediately dumpstered by Abysian infantry. Maws of the earth is also a good spell in alt, lots of damage in a big AOE and locks down troops until they pass a fairly tough strength check. Astral is tougher since Abysian troops generally have good MR... spamming a bunch of body ethereal might actually be your best bet since most Abysians don't have magic weapons. Otherwise, using the S1s as general communion batteries for earth spells is probably your best bet, though you'll want to skew heavy on the slave:master ratio since it'll all be off-path fatigue.
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May 4, 2024 17:58
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namehereguy posted:So, uh, I have a single player game going as Ind, and I'm at war with Abysia, who have control of the caverns. I took a fire+solar weapons bless, which is, uh, totally useless against Abysia. I have Orinde and Picyone forts, and have done a fair amount of research. Right now I have them stuck on a fort at the tunnel up to my territory, but I just lost a big fight where I tried using Astral Fires and it took out half my cap-only mage recruitment for the entire game. I do have a bunch of S1 Ind sages for a communion, but I'm not sure what I can cast that beats Abysian infantry with astral, earth, and fire. IIRC Solar Brilliance negates all darkness penalties, but it will gently caress up low MR troops. It sounds like you're not using dogmans anyhow though (which might be part of your problem.) For pure astral vs. large blobs of armored troops you should be looking at spamming Astral Geyser, for small amounts of elite troops go for boosted soul slays.
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May 4, 2024 18:02
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the holy poopacy posted:IIRC Solar Brilliance negates all darkness penalties, but it will gently caress up low MR troops. It sounds like you're not using dogmans anyhow though (which might be part of your problem.) Solar brilliance sadly requires the presence of the sun, so it won't work in the caves. The only way I can think of to light up the caves would be firestorm, which, uh... maybe not the best play against Abysia haha. If you can scrape together an N3 then Cat-eyed warriors is an option that would mostly negate the darkness penalties. Summer lions could potentially be an OK summon as well if you can get a bunch of them, they won't care about fire or heat, are unaffected by darkness, and are both ethereal and have high HP. DarthRoblox fucked around with this message at 18:13 on May 4, 2024 |
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May 4, 2024 18:11
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the holy poopacy posted:IIRC Solar Brilliance negates all darkness penalties, but it will gently caress up low MR troops. It sounds like you're not using dogmans anyhow though (which might be part of your problem.) I remember using Solar Brilliance to great effect in Dom 5. Sadly, even with middle to high MR, my armies kept rolling badly, and I always ended up with half+ of my army blinded. RNG is a bitch.
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May 4, 2024 18:12
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Fighting a nation with spirit sight in caves as a nation without it is pretty frustrating. I really think the game could do with a an earlier spell that counters darkness without the presence of the sun.
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May 4, 2024 18:18
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Here's a question: I'm playing single-player as LA Pyrene and my last major opponent after I'm done dealing with Man is Atlantis. What's a good way to get going underwater? I have a couple of Turtle Villages under my control but those will only be useful for raiding and catching undefended provinces.
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May 4, 2024 18:22
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Tarezax posted:Here's a question: I'm playing single-player as LA Pyrene and my last major opponent after I'm done dealing with Man is Atlantis. What's a good way to get going underwater? I have a couple of Turtle Villages under my control but those will only be useful for raiding and catching undefended provinces. Can you seize enough thrones to win without having to beat them underwater? If you can boost up to blood 5, Bind Heliophagus can roll decent death mages who open up a ton of amphibious undead options. It's tough to compete underwater without water mages for UW summons/battlemagic, though. Indie W mages are a huge leg up; if you have any jade amazon provinces that might be a start.
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May 4, 2024 18:33
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LA Pyrene is gonna have a real hard time fighting UW because you can't use any of your blood magic there, so it will be all Glamour and LA Atlantis gets magic weapons on almost all of its troops. You'll need to use A2 Sorginas to forge pills of water breathing (Const 5). Also you desperately want a W2 if you can find one from a Throne or empower a w1 indie mage to forge a water bracelet (const 7) and summon a Sea King (Conj 6). Speleothing fucked around with this message at 18:39 on May 4, 2024 |
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May 4, 2024 18:35
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DarthRoblox posted:How did astral fires take out your own mages? It was the fight in general that took them out; I overloaded them on fatigue and couldn't run away when the main line broke.
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May 4, 2024 18:38
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Oh hmm I was going to recommend storm demons since they can hurl their lightning underwater just fine which is a huge advantage, but LA sorginas are a lot worse than MA sorginas, so maybe that’s not as viable.
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May 4, 2024 18:39
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my kinda ape posted:Fighting a nation with spirit sight in caves as a nation without it is pretty frustrating. I really think the game could do with a an earlier spell that counters darkness without the presence of the sun. Cat's eyes spells, alteration, nature. Darkvision 50%, easy to get an indie caster for, reduces penalty to only -1 to relevant stats at which point it's entirely negligible. Tarezax posted:Here's a question: I'm playing single-player as LA Pyrene and my last major opponent after I'm done dealing with Man is Atlantis. What's a good way to get going underwater? I have a couple of Turtle Villages under my control but those will only be useful for raiding and catching undefended provinces. There is no good way of going underwater, it's a major issue with the game. Amphibian auxilliaries are a start, water breathing items in air, water, and nature/water are useful, summoning amphibious units and mages is another thing that can be done. Nuclear options: "Thetis\ Blessing" to let everyone go there (overcast it by a lot, a dispel would be... unpleasant) and "Sea of Ice" to lock THEM down there. Ideally, you don't have to launch a full scale invasion of the oceans and only need something specific out of there. DarthRoblox posted:Oh hmm I was going to recommend storm demons since they can hurl their lightning underwater just fine which is a huge advantage, but LA sorginas are a lot worse than MA sorginas, so maybe that’s not as viable. People keep saying this about LA Sorginak, but they're better, if anything, being much cheaper and more massable via foreignrec, and still getting you all the needed paths. That having been said, not sure if storm demons would work. (Not sure they wouldn't work either) An option for you would be giving snorkels to your succubi/incubi and fishing out some UW mages to support you. Ideally you'd have an UW province to take them into, since bringing a seduced aquatic mage to the surface would end poorly.
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May 4, 2024 19:42
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I'd theorycraft a stealthy undead with an amulet of province plague and lose because that's very costly. Also I really dislike foreignrec, it's especially annoying when you have to position forts so that the non forted provinces don't wind up with zero resources.
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May 4, 2024 19:48
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my kinda ape posted:Fighting a nation with spirit sight in caves as a nation without it is pretty frustrating. I really think the game could do with a an earlier spell that counters darkness without the presence of the sun. If anything, you would think making some magical light would be a low level spell in Dominions world! Kind of amazing there isn't a spell that negates darkness penalties in an AoE x in the current huge list of spells (1221 as of right now). edit oh wait, there is something at least similar 
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May 4, 2024 19:52
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Good foreignrec mages that don't require temples are one of the most powerful tools a nation can have access to. Check out MA Xibalba. I swore by Camazots in Dominions 5 when you could realistically only make them from you capital, and now you can make an obscene amount of them if you start underground.
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May 4, 2024 19:53
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It's not that I find them a nation's weakness, it's that I can't wrap my head around it from a setting point of view and a few game rough edges snag at me every now and then.
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May 4, 2024 19:55
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namehereguy posted:So, uh, I have a single player game going as Ind, and I'm at war with Abysia, who have control of the caverns. I took a fire+solar weapons bless, which is, uh, totally useless against Abysia. I have Orinde and Picyone forts, and have done a fair amount of research. Right now I have them stuck on a fort at the tunnel up to my territory, but I just lost a big fight where I tried using Astral Fires and it took out half my cap-only mage recruitment for the entire game. I do have a bunch of S1 Ind sages for a communion, but I'm not sure what I can cast that beats Abysian infantry with astral, earth, and fire. How's your research? If most of your mages are S1, I'd really look into forging a banner of the northern star (2-handed weapon, construction 7, S4), when brought to a battlefield it gives +1 path level boost for all astral mages in the battle. If you can't swing that yet, the same effect is available as the spell "Light of the Northern Star" (Conjuration 4, S3, 2 gems), but it is very noticeably worse because it takes so long to cast that the 3 first spells on your script are wasted. An option to use those 3 first spells is that if your enemy doesn't have lots of magic weapons, casting body ethereal on as much of your frontline as possible can make them a lot toughter to kill. A barbarian or a dogheadman gets a lot more useful in combat when they have luck and body ethereal on them. Once you have a massive line of S2 mages, the most valued offensive spells against Abysia for them are probably: Stellar Cascades (Evo 5), which has a aoe of 7 and does fatigue damage. One cast of it does practically nothing, but when you have a dozen+ mages casting it, it suddenly makes a lot of enemies very sleepy. The big downside is that it's fairly short ranged, you have to put your mages fairly close to the line to have any effect. Paralyze (Thau 4), which is a single target spell that has a bit worse than 50% chance of paralyzing a normal MR12 guy it hits, for about 60 rounds (which is basically all battle). Downside is that it's single target, so you need a lot of mages to have any effect. As an upside, you can't miss and it has range to hit the full battlefield. One your scripts run out, the mages are likely to first buff everyone nearby with body ethereal and luck, and then start casting a lot of mind burn. Mind burn is imho inferior to paralyze or stellar cascades, but if they have managed to disable a lot of the enemy army, having the mages start doing direct damage makes sense. IMHO it's one of the significant strengths of astral magic that a large group of astral mages will, after the script has run out, mostly cast useful spells.
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May 4, 2024 20:20
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another option for massed s1s is star fires, which isn't glamorous but will zap a few guys with AN damage, no save allowed and no setup requiredTuna-Fish posted:If you can't swing that yet, the same effect is available as the spell "Light of the Northern Star" (Conjuration 4, S3, 2 gems), but it is very noticeably worse because it takes so long to cast that the 3 first spells on your script are wasted. it's not quite that bad, with a 225% total cast time lotns will fire around the 113% mark so you can safely set your s1s to 2x body ethereal / 3x cascades or whatever
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May 4, 2024 21:41
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Earthquake does massive damage in caves now, 28 total armor piercing damage to everything (20 to floating/flying units), which I think should be more than enough to kill armored abysians in one hit. Defense can negate this damage but abysians have bad defense, so you should trade very well using earthquake against their stacks. You'll need a communion or a E2 magus supreme with earth boots + summon earthpower to cast it, twist fate will probably save your own mages from dying to it (but maybe not, if the 28 damage is applied as two separate hits?) and body ethereal will also stop the damage 75% of the time
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May 4, 2024 21:47
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Here's a steam post that does a good job summarizing why the current UW mechanics have... problems. https://steamcommunity.com/app/2511500/discussions/0/4363501885839878588
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May 4, 2024 23:08
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Well, I managed to break the Abysian army using a combination of communion casting destroy armor plus my one water guy spamming acid rain and falling frost and summons, only I didn't actually combine the summons so my attempt to break the siege killed half their army at the cost of 80% of my communion slaves and then their storming of the castle that turn failed. Still, I have control of the surface forts so I can make more communion slaves/S1 casters. I am also making a new fort I hope will get me whatever Femine has for paths these days, but I do not know what determines whether I get them or Picyone. Speaking of underwater, I am also at war with Pelegia, and yeah that's basically a non-event. I have W1 on two guys, two indie provinces that can recruit underwater units, and no air at the moment. Meanwhile the AI has crap mermen, so they took a couple provinces with weak PD and then got swatted and I don't expect they'll be back in force. I think in all my (single-player) playing since Dom3 I have made a serious move underwater like once as a nation that's not an Atlantean successor state or that surface merman one. As water, better hope you're Atlantis, Ys, or MA/LA R'leyh because while it's hard to get land troops underwater it's flatly impossible to get aquatic troops on the surface.
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May 5, 2024 01:56
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my dad posted:Here's a steam post that does a good job summarizing why the current UW mechanics have... problems. I like that this post from 2015 and two games ago calls out resources not crossing the water barrier as stupid. Why does that still exist
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May 5, 2024 02:20
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Chiming in late on the Abysia talk, I want to throw in my five cents- some small mobility blesses can be a big help, especially if you find yourself forting mountainous/hilly provinces. To some extent you can supplement or replace with boots, but this type of bless helps you concentrate your magical firepower, but won’t help the lava warriors much.
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May 5, 2024 02:24
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I like how dominions doesn’t feature boats in any capacity aside from as an abstract transport stat despite there being several nautical themed nations Wonder if anyone’s tried jury rigging a boat in a mod as an underwater unit permanently floating at the highest elevation
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May 5, 2024 03:54
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The anti-UW nuclear option is now the global Remnant in the Depths that very quickly drops every single UW province to Death 5, then diseases everything in them and kills all the pop reasonably quickly. Possibly combined with Sea of Ice so they can't escape (may not work vs. R'lyeh or Pelagia.). Of course, you're talking two very niche 9th level spells to research so this is ludicrously impractical in most circumstances, but it's still preferable to the alternative if the UW player is doing well.
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May 5, 2024 05:08
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