Thanks for the heads up man, sounds like a great time to dive back in and try it out.
Good to know.
Have they added heroes? I see your later post where they have added lesser heroes. I long for….
They have just added minor heroes. They are currently working on adding major heroes which will be unique and have unique abilities.
Oh, and one of the recent major additions that I forgot to mention is that some units can now evolve. For example, if you summon a baby dragon using a world spell and then level it up to level 10, you can choose to evolve it into a young dragon which is much stronger. The young dragon will eventually evolve into a dragon and then, finally, an ancient dragon (which is pure death on wings).
There are many units that can be evolved in this way and it’s a very fun new mechanic.
EDIT: I’ve added this to the list in my post up-thread.
Thanks for the write up. Can you have multiple saves?
Yes indeed. You have unlimited save slots. Plus it autosaves as well.
This does sound promising. Do the graphics get in the way of the game? I mean, is everything clear and recognizable? I’m OK with the AI being competitive by getting some bonuses, but do the bonuses seem like an unnatural hurdle that circumvents some of the game features or does it all seem pretty fair? UI seem ok?
I think the graphics are fine. Here’s a screenshot from a recent DasTactic Twitch stream so you can see what it looks like.
And here is the link to that new stream. I’m not sure how long it will be up there. There’s several new ones there he’s just done.
Yes, the AI bonuses seem fair as they only kick in on the higher difficulties. The UI is pretty good and you have the in-game help and the in-game Unit/Spell compendium. You can right click on just about everything in the game to get information including units. There is a LOT to learn though as it’s pretty deep. Just about like learning the ins and outs of the Dominions games, I’d say. About that level of depth.
Some tips I put together for new players:
When your deity is materialized (as a unit operating in the game world) their spell power is the spell power number you see on the unit page and can be improved by leveling up. However, when they are dead (etherialized), then their spell power is determined solely by how many spells they have researched in a spell tree (fire, arcane, nature, etc.). You can see that info on the Deity tab at the top. To improve your etherialized deity’s spell power in a spell tree, learn more spells. To improve your materialized deity’s spell power, level up.
The amount of resources and gold you get in the game from your cities depends on population. The more population you have, the more city workers you get to work the city hexes.
Every time your city grows another 1000 population, you can build another civic structure there. The number of buildings you can build in your city depends entirely on how much population it has.
Population growth rate depends on enough enough excess food being grown your cities. For that reason, at the start of the game your engineer should concentrate on building farms around your city.
After you build improvements (like farms) with your engineer you can then improve them in up to 2 different ways. Some improvements have levels (like mana farms) that go from 1 to 5 or 1 to 10. After building the initial improvement for 500 gold, you can then level it up but each level you build costs more.
The second way to improve them is to build roads on the improvement. This needs to be done for farms because your farms initially don’t have levels like some other improvements do until you first research the appropriate civic technology and then you can level up farms as well. Once you build a road, you can widen/improve the road by building a road again on the same hex at a higher cost. Each time you build a road on a hex, you increase the number of city workers that can work that hex. THIS IS HUGE. I really wish I’d figured this out sooner as it is the key to expanding your city. Build lots of roads on farms.
The first civic structures you should build in your town are the production structures. They allow you to build following stuff faster.
Building stuff in town requires both production and resources. At first the resources your town gets per turn will be lower than your production per turn so your build speed will be capped by that.
When your units fight critters in outdoor lairs and dungeons, they get food and resources afterwards. They can only carry so much so when they get full, you need to go to the nearest city and transfer it to the city’s resource and food warehouses. If that city has less resources than production per turn, then it can pull from the warehouse you just filled to max out production speed until the warehouse is empty. There are civic buildings to increase the size of warehouses.
You can build a supply wagon unit and take it with you to dungeons and lairs. When your units get full you can dump the food and resources into the supply wagon and then send it back to town to unload.
Bookmarked. Thank you!
There are two files in the main game folder you can tweak the game settings in. This is in addition to the in-game settings.
One is named ui_settings.txt. That one allows you to tweak the font size and thickness and other UI settings.
The other one, that is more commonly used, is named game_settings.txt and is in the same folder. Below are the settings that I changed in there and why:
starting_battle_mana = 30
starting_meditation = 40
Someone on the forums recommended these changes for new players and I agree with them. Starting battle mana is 20 by default. This is the amount of mana your deity has to cast in battles every turn. To increase it requires casting an “increase battle mana” world spell over and over at the exclusion of anything else and takes a log time to ramp up. A lot of players, including me, like to jump start it a bit.
Starting meditation is similar and also has a default of 20. Meditation is the amount of mana that is used to cast world spells every turn (including summons and unit buffs) and is used to replenish battle mana. Like battle mana above, to increase it you have to cast a world spell. Again, I like to jump start it by doubling it because it takes forever to increase it in-game with world spells unless you take certain deity abilities.
item_drop_rate_factor = 200
This is the chance for equipment and items to drop in lairs and dungeons. The default is 100, which imo is too low. You get a lot of crap items you can’t even equip or use in the game and you’ll get very few of them with the default setting. Doubling it to 200 causes things to drop at a rate I think is good. Also note there is a world spell you can cast to increase the size of your Item Vault if it starts to fill up.
Great tips!
Those tweaks to the game settings sound like changes I would definitely want to make. I am really trying to find time to jump into this, but I just don’t have much time to get into any serious gaming lately and the time I have I am using on our Dom 5 team game.
Thanks for sharing, though! I will be coming back here once I dive in.
Thank you @Coldsteel. I upped font size from 0 to 1 and fonts are much easier to read.
And I tried the other changes you recommended in the game_settings file and the item drop rate factor increase makes this game a little less dry and a bit more fun.
Once you get some upper tier troops and get them leveled up, you’ll be finding a lot of nice stuff for your item vault. At first you don’t get that much but later in the game you can find 5 or 6 items in one dungeon, depending on how many floors you descend. There’s loot on each floor so after 4 or 5 floors you’ll typically have found a few spell books, soul gems and equipment items (plus gold, mithril, adamantium, etc.).
Speaking of dungeons, make sure you turn dungeon loot/levels on in the in-game settings if you enjoy dungeon diving. Once you’re in-game on the main screen, look at the bottom right where there are some icons and one of them looks like a gear. Click that and it will bring up the game settings menu. Check the ‘Dungeons contain treasures + levels’ box there. I also check the ‘Dungeons are explored’ box, so I can see the dungeon outline (though everything within that is hidden and must be explored). The final thing you might want to change is the dungeon size. I changed that slider setting to 25 and it gives me decent sized dungeons that aren’t as huge as the default ones. It makes clearing the levels out faster.
Edit: BTW, finding spell books in dungeons is by far the fastest way to get new spells to learn. If you find them, you don’t have to research the books. I’ve found about 20 holy spellbooks in dungeons so far in my current game. Due to that, I just got the upper tier holy Summon Archangel spell. I can’t wait to summon one and stick it in my main army.
So for someone who is wanting to get a game like this, how does this compare to Dominions 5 and if you were going to get either this or Dom 5 which would you recommened as a single player game?
In terms of learning curve and complexity/depth, I think the two games are very similar. Beyond that, they are very different games. DE has turn based combat, Dominions does not. Dominions has simultaneous maps moves, DE is classic turn by turn map movement. Dominions has providence searching similar to the Eador games, DE has dungeons with multiple levels to explore and clear for loots/equipment/spellbooks.
The Mechanics of DE are basically the same as MOM with some additions and differences (it doesn’t have mana nodes, for example). It’s like a slower paced MOM with more depth and much more complex town building/management.
The DE AI is better than Dominions so I think it’s a better SP game for that reason. The AI players will mess you up at anything higher than normal difficulty if you let them get ahead of you in pop/production. The AIs are also very, very aggressive and will go after weak cities or stacks relentlessly.
DE has a lot more game customization. It’s crazy how many setting there are between the new game setup screens and the text config files you can edit manually.
I think you have talked me into spending $25 this weekend.
Just be aware it took me over 20 hours of play just to start to get a handle on the game. And that included a ton of reading posts and asking questions on the game’s Steam forum. The folks there are super friendly and helpful.
Also, it just went off sale so you might want to wait and see if it goes back on for the upcoming Steam summer sale.
I have a few questions.
Is there a way to pan the map without using the mouse edge scroll? I have tried the arrow keys and wsad and some combos of mouse buttons with no luck.
In the battle screen are there hot keys to defend and to end the turn? Is there a settings somewhere that I can see all the game hot keys?
Since the last time I played, it now seems that I have to fully explore dungeon maps in order to finish, this is tedious. Is there a way to turn that off?
Not that I know of.
Yes. Spacebar sets the unit to ‘defend’ and skips to the next unit while ‘e’ ends the turn. Hit the F1 button in-game to bring up the help and look under the ‘hotkeys’ section. Here’s the full list:
======================================
Hotkeys
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Worldmap:
• F1 : bring up the help manual.
• spacebar : rest all selected units for one turn.
• e : end turn.
• c : center the map on the currently selected army.
• z : reset the zoom level.
• n / right-arrow : select the next army that can perform actions this turn.
• p / left-arrow : select the previous army that can perform actions this turn.
• f : sleep all selected units. The units remain inactive until you manually select them again with the mouse.
• ctrl+s : quick save the current game.
• ctrl+g : toggle the size of map gridlines.
• ctrl+L : toggle showing the combat log.
• m : show the end-of-turn message box.
• s : bring up the cast spell panel.
• f5 : toggle showing city owners, and city spheres.
• f6 : toggle showing current/max road level, current/max improvement level.
• f7 : toggle showing improvements/roads/walls, cities, armies on the world map.
• f2 : toggle showing terrain info while viewing the world map.
• f3 : toggle showing an icon for army strengths on the world map.
• f4 : toggle showing army info while viewing the world map.
• ctrl+v : toggle vsync while the game is running.
Battlemap:
• F1 : bring up the help manual.
• spacebar : rest the active unit for one combat round; or makes the AI animations instant for the duration of the current AI turn.
• e : end combat round, passing control to your enemy.
• c : center the map on the active unit.
• z : reset the zoom level.
• n / right-arrow : select the next unti that can perform actions this combat round.
• p / left-arrow : select the next unti that can perform actions this combat round.
• f : sleep the active unit.
• ctrl+f : toggle showing different the flag styles on units in combat.
• ctrl+g : toggle the size of map gridlines.
• ctrl+L : toggle showing the combat log.
• s : bring up the cast spell panel.
• t : will change the transparency of units (useful for seeing behind large units). The active unit and the unit under the mouse will remain fully opaque.
• up/down arrow : change the brightness in dungeons.
• f2 : shows line of sight for the active unit. Useful for Piercing Shot ability, or to determine if walls will block ranged attacks (among other things).
• f3 : toggle showing hit chance details during battle.
• f4 : select an AI target for the active unit to focus on (or a tile to move to if no enemy is seen). Use in conjuction with the Auto Battle button: cycle through each unit in your army, press F4 to choose a target for each, then hit Auto Battle and they will pursue/attack their designated targets.
• f5 : show tiles which have never been seen. Useful to determine where you still need to explore in a dungeon.
• ctrl+b : toggle using the number keys to select attacks or cast spells.
• Number Keys : select attack/spell.
• Ctrl+Number Keys : select spell/attack.
======================================
Tips
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Use the mouse wheel to change the zoom level of the map view and various other screens. Holding down the control+shift key while using the mousewheel will change the vertical scale of the map view.
Once you’re in-game on the main screen, look at the bottom right where there are some icons and one of them looks like a gear. Click that and it will bring up the game settings menu. Check the ‘Dungeons contain treasures + levels’ box there. Then you just need to find the stairs on that level and move a character over it, you can descend to the next level or leave the dungeon.
You can also reduce the time spent in dungeons a lot by reducing the dungeon sizes from the default to 25 or so with the dungeon size slider on that same page. Experiment to find a size that works for you. note that if you make it too small for the number of units you have plus the dungeon’s defending units number, it will automatically resize it to make it bigger again.