Dominions 5 - Born to be Van Wilder

thanks team. i’ll take Pan

Let me just say that cranking the indies up to 7from 5 changes things on this map. Adjacent to me are 70 barbarians, 70 Deer Tribe, 70 Wolf Tribe, and a province full of Foul Spawn, Vine men, and Ettins. Yes, plural on the Ettins.

yep expansion will be slow. one of the wilde ride’s ‘charms’

Ubar is very powerful if your opponent doesn’t have Spirit Sight. On the other hand, salt makes their thugs very vulnerable to salt. Some have reported stunlocking the big ones with a reasonably powerful thug with salt

I’m the same with ice cream: Ice cream makes me very vulnerable to ice cream.

A few mixed feelings with the Enhanced Pretenders mod. So many options, and some of which have really retuned existing Pretender chassis to be quite potent. I really dislike the art style on the new chassis types though. That has to be my biggest thumbs down for it, and I’m that shallow I’m deliberately not going to choose an ugly looking Pretender because I don’t want to stare at it through the game. Either that or I make it imprisoned… There’s a thought.

Yes, some of them are indeed ugly, but they offer strategies beyond what is traditionally available. Then there’s the selection itself: as ermor, conventionally, you are petty good with 59 choices…but Rus only gets 38 (which includes 10 flavors of rainbow-type mages) and several duplicates like dragons and titans, so their choices are pretty severely curtailed. With the mod, ermor gets 84 and Rus 65. I feel that’s worth some ugly sprites (and some of them are…ok).

But, it’s up to the group, so everyone please check it out and provide feedback!

For what it is worth, there’s something I thought of with Ermor I want to try. It will likely fail, but that’s the fun of the game. But that’s unrelated to Pretender design.

Yeah, I’m happy to keep the mod in. I was mostly airing my thoughts about the sprites. I did see the Prince of Death and other Dom 2 chassis’ for instance gets some serious buffs. I don’t think he’s good enough to pick still, at least for my purposes, but was interesting to note the extra dominion spread chance, invulnerability etc. I actually need to plan my Pretender design better. Normally I cobble things together as I go and then realise after the first 5 turns I’ve missed or done something stupid :)

If anyone wants to committ psychological warfare on me, pick the Night Hunter and keep raiding my lands so I have to see it all the time. Oh, of course, Xibalba gets access to it. Fuck.

ya, i mean, that probably wasn’t your shining moment of brilliance here in this forum to announce that. Plus, it is Akaoni so maybe he’ll be too embroiled with me to annoy you

much

at first?

Hmm, also, just thinking here…

the sprites are in your mod directory and are almost certainly locally sourced for your game. If you really wanted to, you could likely swap out an annoying sprite for a better one (for instance a night hunter for a dragon) and the game would likely be none for the wiser.

And it seemed to work just fine - my ugly NightHunter.tga is now a fine and svelt DrakeLord.tga also, i think you might find that the NightHunter was the worst of the lot - once you remove it, the rest aren’t so bad…

I have not decided quite yet between Ubar and Berytos, but in the interest of moving things along, pyrhic has a choice between C’tis, Caelum and Oceania.

Nah, you misunderstand. Salt hits automatic, so as long as you get up and close, the Genies will be stunned very round. A literally Super Combat, fully equiped, can be stunlocked by a Bane with Salt as long as it can get close.

I wonder how good blood hunting will be, since Blood is linked to both population and Site percentages.

Ooo. More pretender choices, I have played with the mod before, but never messed with Independent site difficulty.

Are we playing with graphs enabled?

Nah, I believe graphs are off (score off in the settings above). What ends up happening is pyrhic spends too much time tracking score changes in an excel spreadsheet and less time scheming, plotting and defending against Akaoni.

that’s not entirely true - my excel tool was pretty efficient and didn’t really require much additional effort to maintain, allowing me more time to analyze and plot and defend against Akaoni.

But yes, scores are disabled. However, there are spells, items and sites that can enable it for your nation if you either plan for it or lucky enough to encounter.

I’m probably going to need a few days to finalize my decision: in a surprising turn of events, dfs actually gave me some interesting choices instead of the 3 flavors of Abyssia I figured I was going to get. Meanwhile, test 3 today ended abruptly when i learned that my chassis was immobile. And not like, a little immobile but could otherwise move with a spell or an item, but more like, this will never ever move. Ever. Which really wasn’t what i was looking for in that pretender. Pity too, cause otherwise he was great.

Yes, please believe that I am a diabolically cunning opponent. Thats going to be my only defense, I fear. Because the rust on my Dominions helmet is staggering. I am seriously considering naming my pretender The Exterminator, because I am so very efficient at killing off bats. I dont think any of my test games have gotten past the first year before I have given up in disgust.
I am going to have to come up with something here soon that works, or I will be wishing I was running Yomi instead.

Is Snerdryn definitely the map? I don’t have an opinion but I know a couple others were floated.

Snerdryn is such an awful name, apropos of nothing. Almost the exact opposite of “cellar door.”

good point - i’ve felt it adequate, and i’ve played it before, but i’m not beholden to it. Try the others out and let us know how you feel?

what about random events being common? it’s a no-brainer that luck 3 is going to be a common choice, but it makes the game somewhat lucky? should they not be less common, and you can spend points trying to make them more common?