You also forget Tir Na’Nog the Celtic one, has heroes with sailing.
I didn’t “forget”, it just it was minor enough (just a single hero, who knows if or when he will appear in your game) to mention ;)
I hate when I lose items when one mage dies one me. Even if he was accompanied by another mages and in an allied province with laboratory. >:(
Ah, fair enough. I only know this because my game where I am playing as them I happened to get him fairly early. He is a beast. I didn’t know if there were others, since I’m not that well versed in the game.
I believe they may be very rare, but I did end up with a province where I could hire navigators in a recent test game. Hmm, it appears it may have been from a Magic Site, so they probably are quite rare.
You can know easily but doing something like this
There is both a Navigator (indie site) and a Captain (mercenary).
To veterans of the series: How many nations have you tried? I wanted to try one of every “type”, like one Ctis, one Agharta, one Caelum, one “roman” nation, one “undead” nation, one “UW” nation, one “giant” nation, but even that limitation, there are just too many to try them :P.
Harder question to answer than it would seem. Having played almost exclusively MP, its hard to try out all that much when ‘trying out’ is a 6-month commitment. On the other hand, I would at least take a lot of nations out for a quick spin while deciding what to play in some games. The other way to get to know a nation is to be at war with them. I set up a lot of test games. You get to know the enemy’s capabilities pretty darn well - or else you lose.
Looking through the nations list, I was actually surprised at how many I feel like I know pretty well even if I never actually played them in a real game. Certainly all of the Dom2 nations (I probably have played all of those at one point or another in an MP game) and nearly all of the Dom3 nations.
I was thinking of this the other day while reminiscing on what WoW was. The thought of another wow, clone or otherwise, doesn’t excite me at all -but a MMO set in the dominions world…well, that’s a different story. And that’s because of what you mention - i like the dark tapestry they’ve put together, and it’s a milieu i’d love to explore in more detail.
Of course with all the death magic, terrible global enchantments that ruin the world and the blood magic sacrificing hundreds of virgins, it is really a kind of shitty world :).
@ron_debry: Of course the question was with both sp tests games and mp together, there is no way that anyone have played a majority of nations with just mp games. How many nations had the game in Dominions 2?
I have been playing this a little while, and now when facing a nation I have this problem I can’t seem to deal with. Basically I send an army in to attack something and after I win a battle, then I see a bunch of reports like “Suddenly a chunk of snow rose up and attacked” then there are these 1 v 1 battles with something that looks like a ice / snow elemental which beats down my commanders. I loose like 4 or 5 commanders each time this happens.
I tried making rings of frost resistances and gave them fire swords even. Still, while my troops are fine, my commanders keep dying. How can I combat this?
I think that’s the Vengeful Water spell in cold provinces, one of the best “defensive” spells in the game. Its an enchantment spell, it affects all the provinces under influence of the enemy’s dominion. It will spawn water elementals that make assassination attempts to your commanders. Because it’s in cold provinces, water elementals appear as Ice Elementals.
How to deal with it?
- Dispel the spell (Astral magic) or at least replace it with a spell of your own (only 5 slots in the game for global spells).
- Push his dominion building more temples, using priests, raiding his temples, etc, as the effect only happens in his dominion. I think its strength can be also regulated by how strong is the dominion?
- Put squads with guard commander orders, if they are like other assassination attempts guards could protect the commanders. Also put extra commanders in your armies in the case 1 or 2 are killed, you can still continue moving.
- Play a defensive war against that enemy, not entering on his Dominions, while you win strength expanding by another side / attacking other enemy without that spell.
First bit is a negative, guard commander only affects troop behavior in battles. A unit needs the bodyguard special ability in order to protect a commander during assassination attempts.
Second bit is valid.
Other options are to equip your commanders with a Skull Talisman or Handful of Acorns. Skull is probably better, but neither will help against Ice elemental due to the trample damage they do.
All other options are sound.
Another choice is to only send your army with decent thug commanders - ie a kitted Pretender or good kitted summon. Something that has good def and can self buff with some magic. Again, could be risky against trampling ice elementals unless kitted correctly or scripted with the right spells.
Depending on which nation you are playing, I’d probably buff the border with temples to push back dominion and work towards a dispel, while expanding elsewhere.
That isn’t true. Guard Commander works as body guards, but I believe you are limited to 5 guards (or 10) on the field. In addition, the higher the assassination ability of a unit, the lower the chance that the body guards will show up. On the other hand, the higher the body guard ability, the higher the chances of the body guard unit.
Please, if you have a question like this, post in the Desura forums. The size of the game, and the high level of patches means that the manual might be missing specific information, but people on the forum regular test and verify their information.
I didn’t notice that it was a global spell. I can probably dispel it since I think I have research level 5 in all trees except blood magic. Maybe once I can do that, I can conduct a proper war. Of course all my good commanders are dead.
Vengeful Water and a dominion push is a great combo. You can also wipe out water nations with it if you manage to push your dominion on a sufficiently large part of their territory. In sea provinces, the elemental assassination is always by a size 6 elemental, so about the only things that can survive it are thugged out Sea Kings or Queens of Elemental Water. Atlantean Basalt Kings, Kings of the Deep etc will at most last until the elemental closes in and then they get one-shotted, or killed the next round at the latest.
I’ve seen one Basalt King survive such an encounter and it was due to lucky damage hits on some spells, unlucky damage hits for the elemental. And this was out of something like 15 Basalt Kings that fell to those assassinations.
So yeah, if your opponent puts up Vengeful Waters, there’s no invading him except maybe at low dominion border provinces until it’s dispelled or overwritten. If a blood sacrifice nation puts that spell up, be afraid. Be VERY afraid! Seeing as in the game that we did that (a disciple game), my partner put the spell up and I used bloodsac to push dominion. Those Berytian Melqart summons at H3 + bloodsac bonus 3 make REALLY short work of enemy dominion…
Vengeful Water and a dominion push is a great combo. You can also wipe out water nations with it if you manage to push your dominion on a sufficiently large part of their territory.
Easy because the lesser number of sea provinces means less temples for uw nations which facilitates dompushing them. :(
Oh, my bad. Swore I read the opposite in some recent research I was doing on assassination.
What is a good number of thrones and throne score to put in a map? How is that affected by the number of players and map size? In a recent game, I put in what I thought was a fair number of thrones, but as it turned out, it still had to mostly take over the world in order to capture enough of them to win.
I want to start a game on that huge map, war of the gods. I am guessing Ill put in 9 factions (should I put in more or less?) plus myself. I have no idea how many thrones and the throne score should be set.
Hmm, I guess it depends on what type of game you would like. I am assuming you are talking about single player and the Glory of the Gods map that has 480 + 122 provinces? Normally people like to keep the provinces per player in the 15-20 or so range, I believe, so for that map I would probably include all of the nations unless you really want a lot of room to expand before hitting other nations. Even if there are 30 nations in an Era (probably not quite that many) it still gives 20 provinces per nation on average.
For thrones, for 10-12 players I would say that about 50% of the throne points is probably good and for maybe 6 players maybe 75%. If you did that huge map with over 600 provinces and max nations, I would say something like 35% should be plenty unless you want a truly epic long game. It sounds like you don’t want the end to drag on so perhaps a lower % would work for you.
For number of thrones, I would default to about one throne per nation on average and you can make the split between them on whether you want tougher level 3 ones with stronger defenders and benefits or split them up per default. If I was doing the huge map you mention with the 600 provinces, I would probably put all of the thrones in there which amount to 20 level 1, 10 level 2, and 5 level 3 thrones for a total of 55 points. That would be 35 thrones for 600 provinces and would probably give a nice spread. I would try to target somewhere between one throne per 10-20 provinces if it was me.
I tend to like to make the games really long so that I can just end them when I want to. The last thing I want is to accidentally win too early or have an enemy do that before I get to try out some really cool end game summon or magic item so if it was me I would probably set the win condition at like 50 of the 55 points although I would probably never truly end it :).
Yeah, it will be the glory of gods map I think. So I should have about 15 total nations, 30 throne points and 15 to win? If I read your comments right. That is 50% of the throne points available, as a rule of thumb, to get victory.
I have another question, I plan on playing the middle era Eramor (the undead romans). I do plan on having the growth domain instead of a death domain. My worry about a death domain is that everyone dies and you have no tax income. Will the growth work or will I be screwing myself?
Your game setup sounds like it would be fun to me anyway. It is hard to say what others would like and how long they would like a game to really last, but it seems like it would be a good start. Just increase the thrones to win for a longer game and shorten it if you want someone to have a chance to win earlier.
I don’t know MA Ermor well at all, but I don’t believe a growth scale setup will do much to counter the MA Ermor innate death spread plus you will need all those corpses for your armies don’t you? Juan just played them very well recently so him or others could probably answer that better than I.